August burnt. A searing sun in a cloudless sky. It was a favourite month of Troy’s. The persistence of childhood. His birthday fell in the last week of August, leaving three whole weeks of anticipation. Even now, when he scarcely bothered to acknowledge birthdays, to see August on the calendar created that same sense of waiting for something. August burnt. He sat on the shady side of the court, read an American novel Kitty had abandoned on his bedside table – Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow. It appeared to be the tale of a man who was partly inspired, partly crazy and completely frustrated. It was not Kitty’s kind of book. It was his kind of book. And he read in the papers of droughts in East Anglia, of peatland fires in Derbyshire, of the extended national tour to the Royals and Empires of provincial Britain by one Vince Christy, of the impending state visit of President Eisenhower – and of the murder of Glenda Felucci in an Essex village and the almost immediate arrest of two unnamed suspects.
And he called Kolankiewicz. ‘What kind of gun killed Bruno’s wife?’
‘A .357. Can we either of us be surprised at that?’
And he waited for the call from Jack that never came. August burnt. August was a month of waiting.
Stanley Onions professed a taste for whisky amounting to discernment. Troy knew him better than he knew himself. Onions’s idea of whisky was a cheap blended from an off-licence that he would food with tap water. Troy cared little for spirits at the best of times and would drink them only to ‘join’ whoever had pulled the cork or twisted the cap. He had done this a lot with Kitty of late. He could see himself doing it this evening. Onions bulked on his doorstep. Blue suit, black boots, short back and sides, bullet-headed, bull-brained and bear-bodied, a battered brown briefcase under one arm, a bottle of whisky clutched in his hand – the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Force disguised as an ordinary copper. The last thing he was. Apart from the odd days when protocol forced him into blue serge and shiny buttons, this outfit, and variations on a theme, were all he ever wore – and it was still a disguise. Onions was an extra-ordinary copper.
‘You goin’ to let me in or do I have to stand here all night?’
‘Sorry, I was miles away.’
‘You were staring like you’d never seen me before.’
No, thought Troy, like I’ve seen you almost every day for twenty years.
Onions held up the bottle. A treat for the two of them. ‘Get a couple of glasses and a jug, lad. I’m gasping.’
This was a lie. If Stan had been ‘gasping’ he’d have put on a brown mac and a cloth cap and sunk a couple of pints in a West End pub, safe in the knowledge that the sharpest reporter in Fleet Street was unlikely to recognise him. Just another displaced Lancashire lad. If he turned up with whisky, he was up to something.
Troy came back from the kitchen. A drowned Scotch for Stan, on a rock for himself.
‘Don’t know how you can drink it like that. Ice with everything. American nonsense. Cheers.’
As far as Troy was concerned, one ice cube thinned out whisky all it needed to be thinned. He didn’t mention that while Stan was swilling a mixture of London tap and corner-shop blended he had helped himself to a shot of Angus’s single-malt seven-year-old Skye Talisker. ‘Cheers,’ he said.
The sofa screamed as Onions flopped his bulk down on to it.
‘How are you keepin’?’
Well, thought Troy, begin with the obvious. ‘My vision’s blurred. Sometimes, particularly if I’ve slept well, it’s close to normal in the mornings. But I don’t sleep well. I end up exhausted and catnapping during the day. My appetite’s erratic. One day I’m Jack Spratt, and next I’m his wife. And my balance is still a bit off, but I don’t really need a stick to walk any more. It’s just belt and braces. My memory’s fine now, my blood pressure is normal and I have a resting pulse at a healthy fifty-five. My libido’s through the roof . . .’
‘Lib-what?’
‘Forget it. Oh, and I’ve got these for reading.’ He plucked a pair of glasses off the mantelpiece. Stuck them on the end of his nose. Onions looked overwhelmed by the torrent of words. ‘Corrects my eyes enough to read. The optician says I won’t need them once my brain recovers from the knock and gets its wires uncrossed.’
‘I’d hang on to them if I were you. Forty-three? You’ll need reading glasses by the time you’re fifty. I did.’
‘How cheery. I feel so much better for you sharing that snippet with me.’
Onions let this go. ‘So . . .’ he said. ‘The upshot of that Nobel Prize acceptance speech is that you’re not too bad?’
‘Fair to middlin’, as you might put it yourself.’
‘Be a damn sight quicker if you’d just said that.’
‘I’d rather not be imprecise while you’re looking for excuses to retire me.’
Onions held out his glass for a refill. ‘Which kind of brings me to the point,’ he said.
‘The answer’s still no.’
‘Oh, that’s not what I’ve come about. That’s over and done with. I can’t force you so that’s that.’
‘Fine. So, what’s what?’
‘It’s that girlfriend o’yours.’
‘Foxx?’
‘No. The posh one. Used to work for the Pole.’
‘Anna.’
‘Right. Your doctor. She’s on at me to find you summat to do. Says you’ll recover quicker with some sort of . . . whatdeyecallit? Stimulus.’
Troy had had no idea that Anna had talked to Onions since he left hospital. He rather admired her persistence. Still more he admired her loyalty, strain it though he would. ‘You could,’ he said, ‘simply let me back on the job.’
Onions swilled Scotch. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That I can’t do, not without the Yard’s surgeon passes you a1, but . . .’
‘Stan. In 1944 you kept me off work for nearly six months regardless of what the Yard’s surgeon said, just because you—’
‘No, I bloody well didn’t. I know you think it was plain vindictive on my part, but you’re wrong. You were sicker than you knew and, if the truth be told, I let you back too early and you needed surgery.’
Troy could hardly deny this.
‘And by your own admission you’re not right. Your ’ead’s not right.’
‘I could hardly lie about that. Stan, if I walk you to St Martin’s Lane to flag down a cab there’s a one in eight chance you’ll see me wobble.’
‘You know, this could be the first conversation I’ve ever had with you without thinkin’, the bastard’s either lyin’ to me or he’s not lettin’ on about summat.’
Clearly Jack had made no mention of after-midnight visits to corpses dotted around the roadworks of the Home Counties or stuck up back alleys in the West End.
‘So, what are you offering?’
‘Just this. I’m swamped. In partickler I’m swamped without you. So this I’ll say . . . the next big murder comes along . . .’
If corpses jointed like pork or dumped in concrete didn’t constitute the ‘next big murder’ Troy wondered what monstrous scale of crime Onions had in mind.
‘. . . you can help the Yard solicitor prepare the prosecution. No roarin’ around in your Bentley, no nickin’ villains. Just the procedural stuff. The paperwork. And not at your desk. Here, in the comfort of your own home.’
Silently Troy cursed him for this. He sounded like an advert for bottled beer. The comfort of his own home? Paperwork? Scotland Yard solicitors? Police procedural? What could be more clichéd? What could be deadlier to the soul than police procedural? What could be less interesting? What could be more boring?
Then Onions opened his briefcase and slapped in front of Troy a buff-coloured file labelled simply ‘Felucci’.
‘Say nowt! Say nowt or I’ll put it back in me bag, tek me bottle of Glen Wellie and bugger off home. Say nowt. Just listen. Jack’s got the Ryan twins in custody. Been three days now and he’s got bugger all out of ’em. Tomorrow at noon we’ll be served a writ of habeas corpus. He’ll be told to charge ’em or let ’em go. Now, I know they did it, Jack knows they did it, I should think by now you know they did it. But he hasn’t charged ’em yet. I’ve not let him. Mind, he’s fit to charge ’em because he couldn’t charge ’em with the murder of that American he found floating in the canal. But that’s not good enough. That’s frustration driving the lad. If we charge ’em now it has to stick. What I have done is this – I had Swift Eddie transcribe and type up everything before I left this evening, every report, every last damn jotted detail. I want you to read it. Just as well you can’t sleep cos I want it read overnight. I want you in the Yard at nine sharp tomorrow morning, and I want you and me and young Wildeve to meet with the duty solicitor and come to a decision.’
‘Can I speak now?’
‘Be my guest.’
‘Who is the duty solicitor?’
‘Sir Owen Rhys.’
‘Does Owen know you’ve asked me for a second opinion, because that’s exactly what you’re doing?’
‘Know? He asked for it himself. Between you and me and the shithouse door, Owen’s found Jack a pain in the arse over this. He thinks it’ll be better coming from you.’
‘What would be better coming from me?’
‘Whatever it is that has to come. We charge ’em, we don’t charge ’em. Either way I want a decision by noon.’
‘What is Owen saying?’
‘No, Freddie, no. You read the file. You make your own mind up and get into that meeting with Owen. You’ll have about three-quarters of an hour before Jack and I join you, and if the bugger jumps the gun I’ll bust him back to sergeant.’
Troy sat up half the night with the file Eddie had typed up. It was a trip to Cloud Cuckoo Land, a falling down the well. It was the most absurd thing ever to come his way with the name of ‘evidence’ attached to it. Tomorrow was going to be hell.
Troy and Rhys met in Troy’s office just before nine. Troy had known Sir Owen Rhys since before the war. Before the war he had looked almost typical of his profession; now he was heading rapidly towards the day when he would be the last man in London to wear a wing collar. Onions left them to it and did not show up until gone half past nine, looking as he always did, spick and span but wearing his suit like armour. By then Troy and Rhys were in total agreement. Today was going to be hell.
Ten minutes later Jack Wildeve and Ray Godbehere came in together, Godbehere looking somewhat fresher than Jack. Jack looked deathly pale, save for the redness around the eyes, clutching a cup of Swift Eddie’s espresso – the synthetic buzz of nights propped up on caffeine and speed visible in the unsteadiness of his hands. His fingertips must surely tingle with the sensation of electricity. Troy had never quite been able to share Jack’s fondness for amphetamines. They all used them from time to time. It was the nation’s favourite pep pill. He’d even known Rod to come home from all-night sittings at the Commons with the saucer-wide look of speed in his eyes. There’d even been talk a while back that Anthony Eden had chewed them like jelly babies during the Suez crisis.
Mary McDiarmuid brought up the rear, clutching a shorthand notepad. Troy was almost certain no one had asked her to take shorthand notes, any more than they’d asked her to park her desk in Eddie’s office. He was almost as certain that everyone else in the room would assume that someone or other had. She flourished her pencil, smiled at Troy, wicked green eyes glinting. He wondered if, having bluffed her way to a seat uninvited, she’d bother to take notes.
Mary was not the problem. Jack was the problem. Troy could feel the repressed rage in him. He thought they would all be lucky to get through this without an explosion of some sort. And if Jack blew, could Onions be far behind?
‘This is hard,’ Rhys began. ‘Hard. But I cannot see that a prosecution brought against these men would succeed.’
For a moment everyone in the room was looking at Jack. He was pushing the cup around the saucer, one finger on the handle in a gesture of unconvincing idleness – but, the ball so bowled, he slammed for six. ‘They did it,’ he said bluntly. ‘I know they did it. You know they did it.’
‘Quite,’ Rhys replied calmly. ‘But you know as well as I, Chief Inspector, that my job is to advise on the preparation of a Crown Prosecution. And I cannot advise on proceeding with a case that is most likely – and I say again, most likely – to be thrown out.’
‘Sir Owen, with all due respect . . .’
‘With all due respect’, particularly when uttered by a man like Jack, was a phrase to set Troy’s alarm bells ringing. Jack had little or no respect for anything. It was something the two of them had in common.
‘. . . do you have any idea who the victims were in this?’
It didn’t require an answer. Rhys was not the sort of man who would have answered.
‘Bruno Felucci is probably the biggest fence south of the Trent. He has no record, he has no convictions for anything more significant than speeding in a built-up area. All the same he is known. To me, to Freddie, to the commissioner, and doubtless by now to Mr Godbehere. It doesn’t take a John Osborne to piece together the drama of that night out in Essex. The Ryan brothers had something they’d stolen. They’d placed it in Felucci’s hands to be fenced. They’d waited for their money. And when they got fed up waiting they went out to Bruno’s and did what most men wouldn’t have dared do to him. They tied up him and his wife and said, “Give us our money or we’ll shoot your wife.” If they’d known Bruno better they might not have dared. If Bruno had known them better he might not have called their bluff. That, plainly and simply, is what happened. Felucci can declare till he’s blue in the face that he is a legitimate businessman on whom two thugs simply burst in for no apparent reason, and the press can steer clear of libel and print such nonsense, but that is what happened. I have no doubt about it and neither has anyone else in this room. I have witnesses who saw them leaving the house – their alibi is tissue-thin – and if I get long enough I’m damn sure I can find the weapon because I think they’re too enamoured of it to throw it away. If we do not charge them now they’ll walk.’
Jack knocked back his Eddie special in a single gulp. Looked from Rhys to Troy and back to Rhys.
Rhys passed the bat to Troy. ‘Chief Superintendent Troy has examined the dossier overnight, I believe. I wonder, what could you tell us, Mr Troy?’
It was better this way, Troy knew. Better by far that he be the one to light the blue touch-paper than Rhys.
‘As I understand it, Jack, Felucci hasn’t identified either of the Ryans.’
Troy leafed through the dossier. ‘The first officers on the scene say Felucci was muttering the word “Ryan” but also add that he seemed delirious. Your own notes from your interviews with Felucci at the hospital, in which you observe that he seemed by then to be rational, state that Felucci denied recognising his attackers and said that he could remember nothing of what he might have said after his wife was killed. The day after this you put him through two separate identification parades, and he failed to pick out either of them.’
‘Freddie, I was with him. He was lying. You could almost feel the man cringe as he passed them.’
‘I don’t doubt it . . . but bear with me. You have also a postman on his way to the sorting office at around five a.m., in the company of a London Transport District Line driver on his way to the depot at Upminster. They see a man – not two men, but one – outside Felucci’s house getting into what they both agree was a Ford Prefect, cream coloured and tatty. They even have a partial on the plate, PGF – a Surrey designation, I think. So far, so good. Yet when put through an identification parade—’
‘Freddie, they identified them!’
‘To be precise, Jack, they each identified only one Ryan . . .’
Troy paused for a second, glanced at the file hoping Jack would fill the gap with some recognition of the approaching absurdity. He didn’t.
‘. . . but not the same Ryan.’
‘Freddie, they’re twins, for Christ’s sake. Identical twins!’
To Troy, who had grown up with twins, twins were only identical to the unobservant. This was not the moment to say so. ‘Then it’s all the more remarkable that they didn’t identify them both.’ Remarkable? It was bonkers.
‘It’s enough to go into court with.’
‘And it’s little enough for the defending counsel to seriously query who they thought they were identifying. It is less than positive ID, and any halfway decent barrister will demolish it in a matter of minutes. It’s an absurdity the like of which I cannot recall. If they wanted to play clever-dicks each Ryan could turn round and say it was the other.’
‘That isn’t what they’re saying.’
‘I know – what they’re saying is that they were elsewhere.’
The fuse was burning steadily now. Jack was juggling incredulity and anger. ‘Say it, Freddie. Just say it. I want to hear you make their alibi sound credible. It can’t be done, but all the same I’d like to hear you try.’
Troy went on undeterred, read out the preposterous statement in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘Patrick and Lorcan Ryan say they were in bed at home with Alice Marx, wife of Alf Marx, currently serving fifteen years for armed robbery.’
Jack opened both hands to the room. ‘QED!’ His hands returned to the table, the index finger of his right hand thumping down with every phrase. Onions and Rhys were not looking at him. Mary McDiarmuid had given up the pretence that she was there to take notes and stared at Jack. Troy watched Jack; Godbehere watched Troy.
‘Alice Marx walked into the Yard yesterday morning with a cock and-bull story they have clearly got her to make up. When I asked them where they were they refused, repeatedly, to answer. One of them eventually said, “With a lady I cannot name,” as though it were a matter of good manners. As though I were interviewing some adulterer caught in a cheap hotel in Brighton rather than a couple of killers. Alice Marx came in at a prearranged time. They planned it that way. A last-minute alibi just as their brief goes for his writ. The pretence strung out for the best part of three days that they were protecting the honour of a lady. The notion of the wife of London’s Mr Big, its Jewish Mr Big, sleeping with a couple of Irish yobbos twenty years her junior . . . Have you ever heard anything so implausible?’
Jack’s gaze roamed around the room, seeking an assent he wasn’t going to get.
‘All the same,’ Troy said, ‘you couldn’t budge her. And I cannot see that counsel will either.’
‘Freddie. It’s lies, it’s all lies.’
‘I know. They did it. I’ve no doubt that they did it. I know. But I’ve also known Alice Marx since I was a beat bobby – take it from me, you put her in the witness box and she’ll stand there like the Rock of Gibraltar. I don’t know how they’ve got her to lie for them, but they have. And now she’s made her statement she’ll stick to it.’
Jack surrendered what little remained of his patience. One hand counted off points on the finger of the other. ‘I have two witnesses. I have an alibi that is as shot full of holes as a pair of old socks—’
‘You have no forensic corroboration. No blood, no car, no weapon.’
The fingers counted off again: ‘They burnt everything they were wearing. They run a garage, so the car is in a thousand pieces by now, spread over every scrapyard in London. They have the gun stashed. To come up with corroboration I need time.’
Onions spoke for the first time since greeting them all, slicing methodically through Jack’s rage.
‘Time,’ he said softly, ‘is what you don’t have. We’ve been served a writ of habeas corpus. We’ve less than two hours.’
‘You mean you’re going to let them walk?’
Onions looked at his wristwatch. ‘Not a minute before I have to but, yes, at noon they walk.’
Jack rose from his chair. Both hands momentarily locked into his hair, as though he would yank it out in a second. Only now could Troy see how dishevelled he was. The suit looked as though he’d slept in it, but Troy could only guess when Jack had last slept. He doubted he’d slept in three nights. ‘I do not believe this!’
Rhys cut in. It seemed like an age since he’d last spoken. ‘Chief Inspector, I think a case in which guilt or innocence hinges on the ability of eyewitnesses to identify and distinguish between identical twins might be without precedent. You got lucky in having two eyewitnesses, unlucky in that they did not agree. Unlucky they saw only one man at the scene of the crime. If they’d seen both, things might well be different. Or if they’d identified the same brother you might have the ghost of a chance. With them identifying different brothers—’
‘But they’re idiots. Complete idiots.’
‘No, Mr Wildeve, they’re our witnesses. If they’re idiots, they’re our idiots.’
‘I simply do not believe this. I do not fucking believe this. You’re going to let them walk because two idiots cannot agree, two complete fucking idiots? I do not fucking believe this!’
Onions got up and said tersely, ‘My office. Now.’
And Troy was grateful that the old man had not exploded. Jack was pushing him to the limit. He’d done it many times himself. It would be good to know when Onions would explode, but impossible to guess. He was cutting Jack some slack. Troy wondered if Jack was cool enough to recognise this and back down now.
Rhys had got up and was pretending to find the view from Troy’s office window interesting. Mary McDiarmuid sat with her pencil between her teeth. Godbehere was still looking at Troy.
Jack turned to Troy, the waving hands flopping at his side as though drained of all energy. He, too, was looking straight at Troy.
‘Shit,’ was all he said. And ‘Shit,’ again.
He turned his back on them and followed Onions.
Mary McDiarmuid flashed a fake smile at Troy over the pencil. The next to get up was Godbehere.
‘Spit it out,’ said Troy.
‘I was just wondering, Mr Troy.’
‘Yes?’
‘What have you got me into?’
Troy turned to Mary McDiarmuid. ‘Where are you holding them? The cells?’
‘Interview room four.’
‘The one with the mirror?’
She nodded.
‘Good. I’d like to take a look at them before we turn them loose.’
The Ryans sat opposite one another, either end of a fag-burnt wooden table into which dozens of bored suspects had scratched their initials with anything from blunt pencils to cufflinks over the years. They were past that. They didn’t even look bored: they grinned and giggled like schoolboys, as they played the most elementary of non-sequitur word games.
‘Parsnip.’
‘Toad.’
‘Twat.’
This brought on near hysterics.
‘Yugoslavia.’
‘Bournville.’
Another fit of giggles rendered them both speechless. Troy had seen his sisters do this. It was not the unlikeliness or absurdity of sequence and juxtaposition that mattered, it was how close the random words came to what the other was actually thinking. If one were to believe Hollywood, and The Corsican Brothers, twins were not just telepathic: they felt each other’s feelings as well as thinking each other’s thoughts. Troy thought this was bollocks, but his sisters would never quite abandon the notion that a common identity meant common thought. If they each felt what the other felt, then that was more than likely because they did everything together. So, it seemed, did the Ryans. And the constant company of the second self did for them what it had done for Troy’s sisters. It had made them into overreachers. Arrogant egotists who thought rules were for fools. Men born to transgress.
‘Catford.’
‘Winklepickers.’
‘Dogshit.’
‘Coppers.’
Then both heads turned as though choreographed by Busby Berkeley, both bodies rose from their chairs, four legs propelled them to the mirror. They pressed the palms of their hands and their noses to the glass like the postcard kid outside the sweetshop, flattening flesh, like dead meat hit with a hammer.
‘Coppers,’ they said, breathing mist on to the glass. ‘Dogshit, coppers, dogshit.’
And they laughed so hard they could hardly stand. Troy could not but admire the synchronicity.
He became aware that Jack was standing next to them. He had no telepathy with Jack.
‘First time you’ve seen them since the war?’ Jack said softly.
‘No – I got a look at them at the Empress.’
‘Of course. What are you thinking?’
‘I’m thinking in cliché– a cliché of our class, I’m afraid, but a true one none the less. You can take the man out of Shadwell, but not Shadwell out of the man.’
‘They still live in Shadwell.’
‘They may live there, but they’re taking over the West End. They have clean fingernails, decent haircuts, Savile Row suits, handmade shoes and, for all I know, you, me and they all patronise the same shirtmaker. They’ve got it, they’re flaunting it, and it disguises nothing of what they really are. They still drink tea from the saucer.’
‘Are we snobs now, Freddie?’
‘If you recall, Jack, most of the Yard refers to us as the “Tearaway Toffs”. Fine. Be a toff for two minutes. Look beneath the bespoke suit. It’s the veneer on their animal hide. I’m amazed that there are people who cannot see it. I’m amazed that there are people who see charm and egalitarianism in this. Perhaps that’s what we’re doing, preaching about egalitarianism and the new meritocracy, and failing to see that the two are contradictory. Meanwhile this rough beast slouches towards Mayfair. The Empress will just be the beginning if we don’t stop them.’
‘Quite,’ said Jack, much as Troy might have done himself, then, ‘Don’t you think it’s time we stopped fighting one another.’
‘Way past,’ Troy replied.
‘Then perhaps the first thing is that you get yourself off the sick list and back to work. Having you on the outside pissing in has been a pain in the arse. You’ve just cured a massive headache for Stan. Surely now is the right time to ask the old man.’
‘He won’t do it. Last time he told me to bugger off. He’ll be more polite about it now, all the same, the basic message won’t change. But I’m working on it.’
‘How?’
‘Stan’s going to get shit for this. There’ll be pressure on him. God knows who these two have bought. Possibly even political pressure. Thinking like a toff again, that’s the one thing class and upbringing have not equipped Stan to handle. He needs me. He just doesn’t know it yet.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Oh, there’ll be pressure, all right. I can guarantee it.’
‘And this pair of laughing jackasses?’
Jack put a finger on the glass, where one or other of them had left a trail of spittle. The Ryans were cavorting about the room, yelling, ‘Coppers’ and ‘Dogshit’ at one another as though they’d just discovered a Zen mantra or a football chant. It was music hall at its worst. They slipped their expensive jackets back off their shoulders, tucked up their bespoke trousers legs and duckwalked like Max Wall. Showmen with a captive audience.
‘I mean to say,’ Jack went on, ‘they’re going to have a free hand until we can catch them at something else. They’ll be kicking sand in our faces just like this until we do. Stan’s just told me to ease off them. No surveillance until further notice. I think you’re right. He’s getting pressure. Their brief ’s already screaming about victimisation.’
‘Did Stan say anything about Mazzer?’
‘No.’
‘Then we’ll follow Mazzer. That is, if you now agree we don’t have much choice?’
‘I can’t see what Mazzer can have had to do with the murder of Glenda Felucci but, yes, I concede the point. Mazzer is all we’ve got now. I just wish it were more.’
‘Set Eddie on to him. He looks less like a copper than anyone else on the force.’
‘Eddie’s working on the review.’
‘What review?’
‘Stan’s manpower review. Eddie’s got the job of assessing how many blokes we can strip from the divisions and draft into Notting Hill if it starts to boil over like it did last year. The last thing Stan wants is more race riots.’
‘How long?’
‘It’s due in in about ten days. We could always urge Eddie to bash it out in five.’
‘Fine. That gives me time to do what I have to do. There are a couple of people I need to talk to.’
Troy’s Bentley pulled up in a leafy avenue in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Once he had told Mary McDiarmuid to wait and the sound of the engine had rattled down to nothing he stood and listened. This wasn’t London, this was someplace else. The sound of a blackbird, a child in the distance laughing, the gentle mathematics of a Bach well-tempered prelude drifting through an open window. This wasn’t London.
He checked the address he’d copied down from her statement. Alice Marx had bought herself a corner house on Palmerston Grove – the unquaintly named Rutherford Court. Don’t mix science and politics, as Troy’s father had once told him. An L-shaped house, with the front door set squarely in the long stroke of the L, a new-looking fence separating the short stroke for privacy – privacy in a street where your neighbours were not cheek-by-jowl, where lace curtains did not twitch, and housewives did not stand in the doorways giving out the gossip. This wasn’t London. This wasn’t Hampstead, this wasn’t a garden and it wasn’t a suburb. This was what Ally Marx had chosen to escape London. Troy had often wondered why Kolankiewicz had chosen to live here. He’d never explained, but it had something to do with the man’s sense of security. His end to running. The same might apply to Ally Marx.
Troy yanked on the bell-pull.
‘My God. My God. Where did you spring from? It must be – what? Then years?’
Alice Marx was probably about the same age as Troy. She hadn’t worn well. A good dye job dealt with the grey hair, but nothing would erase the sharp creases round her mouth where she’d spent a lifetime doing just what she was doing now, pulling on a cigarette, pursing her lips and letting the smoke roll down her nose. She was a good shape, Mrs Marx, a slender figure in silk blouse and cotton slacks, but her face could only be described as the ruin of a former beauty. She didn’t seem to give a damn.
‘More like fifteen, Ally.’
‘Sergeant Troy, Sergeant Troy, George Bonham’s little boy.’
Troy could hear the rhyme, a taunting schoolboy metre. He was pretty certain she couldn’t.
‘It’s Chief Superintendent now, Ally.’
‘I always knew you’d make good. Alf always said you’d run the soddin’ Yard one day.’
‘You going to invite me in?’
‘Of course. I don’t need to ask why you’ve come, do I?’
She turned on her heel. Left him to close the door. He followed her into a big sitting room. A model of neatness, not a cushion out of place, the magazines fanned out across a heavy glass coffee-table, a paperback copy of Peyton Place splayed on the arm of a plush, apricot-coloured armchair, and an ashtray on stilts with a whiz button to make unsightly fag ash vanish in a flash.
Alice turned to face him. ‘You wanna talk, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then take off your jacket and roll up your shirt.’
‘Eh?’
‘You wanna talk to me, you do as I say. I’m not talking to you ’cept off the record. So I wanna know up front that you’re not making any records. Roll up yer shirt.’
‘Alice. I don’t think we have that kind of technology.’
‘Shirt or walk, Troy. Your choice.’
Troy removed his jacket, feeling as though he were in front of the school matron, and hocked his shirt up above his nipples.
‘Oy-vey!’ she said, softly parodic. ‘Troy, you’ve taken a battering in your time.’
Troy said nothing. Turned his back to her so that she could see that he did not have whatever device she thought he might.
‘OK. So you’re clean. Come in the kitchen and I’ll make us some coffee.’
She set the kettle to boil. Scooped an inch of ground coffee into the bottom of a cafetie`re and chattered about her decorators and her builders and the trouble she’d had getting the house as she wanted it. ‘It’s not being able to work with your own. That’s what it is. I got a lovely bathroom now. The doin’s . . . but half the tradesmen in North London are idiots. And can you get a Jewish plumber? Can you my fanny. There’s no such soddin’ thing as a Jewish plumber.’
Troy had a momentary vision of marble tops and gold taps. Perhaps a lavatory seat in a seahorse pattern. A pale green bath. The innate snobbery of his upbringing sitting calmly with the radicalism of his family’s politics, thinking nothing of his inward sneer at the lack of taste so manifested.
At last she stuck a cup and saucer in front of him on what he knew was termed a ‘breakfast bar’. She pulled up a stool. He perched opposite her, thinking this was the most uncomfortable posture to eat any meal and that if it was designed for breakfast he’d far rather take it standing up as his father had done, pacing round his study, bowl of salty porridge in hand, belting out ideas to the boy Troy faster than Troy could catch them.
‘Ginger nut?’ she said.
‘Love one,’ said Troy.
She rolled the packet towards him. As he bit into one she said, ‘Dunk if you want. Alf always did. I could never get him to stop. Couldn’t get him to drink the real stuff either, but you’re used to it, aren’t you? Can’t see you drinking Maxwell House.’
It was the first time Alf ’s name had come up. He wondered where the mention of her husband would lead her, but all she said was ‘When you’re ready.’
There could only be one question. ‘Why?’
‘Why?’
A slow stirring of her coffee, her eyes not meeting his. Then the upward tilt of the head, eyes locking on to his like radar.
‘Millie,’ she said simply.
‘Millie?’
‘I’ve known Millie Champion all my life. She was Millie Levine when we was kids. A couple of years younger’n me. A skinny scrap of a girl with legs like beanpoles, and two trails off snot hangin’ off her nose like icicles. We nicknamed her Raggety. I imagine there are still blokes in Bethnal Green who think her name’s Raggety. Millie’s the little sister I never had. Bernie? A pain in the arse. I never thought she should marry a putz like Bernie. But what could I say? I’d married Alf. I hadn’t a stiletto heel to stand on. But, like I said, we grew up together. We stuck together. She cried on my shoulder when Bernie disappeared.’
Troy wondered if there might be mention of Alice crying on Millie’s shoulder when Alf got banged up for fifteen years. There wasn’t. She paused to sip coffee and picked up her thread with no mention of Alf.
‘So. When those Irish sacks of shit went to her and said she’d never see Bernie alive again if I didn’t come up with an alibi for them she didn’t have to plead with me. I said yes straight away. I don’t see what else I coulda done.’
‘Bernie’s dead. You know that, don’t you?’
‘You found the body?’
‘Not yet.’
‘And maybe you never will. But you’re right. Of course Bernie’s dead. But what kind of a friend would I be if I kept telling her that? I just said I’d do it. I alibied the bastards.’
‘When?’
‘Two days before they went out to Bruno Felucci’s. They knew what the odds were. Chances were they’d end up shooting somebody. I just never thought it would be Glenda. In fact, I’d no idea what I was covering them for until I read it in the papers.’
‘A blanket alibi for that night?’
‘If you like.’
‘Did they get in touch with you personally?’
‘Worse than that. I met with them up West in a hotel. Just to get our stories straight and to come up with enough to withstand cross-examination if it ever came to that.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as we all stripped off. I had to be able to point to a mole or a scar or whatever it was. I told ’em up front. Any funny business and I’d scratch their eyes out. But there weren’t no funny business. That was what was so odd. It was business. That and nothing more. And do you know what sticks in the mind? No offence, you being a goy and all, but the ugliest sight in the world has got to be an uncircumcised prick. And I had to get a gander at two of ’em. Never seen one before. And there I was lookin’ at a matchin’ set. Like two choppers in babies’ bonnets. And I went round their place, so I could clock the colour of the wallpaper and which side the light was on and all that nonsense. Then it was all down to time and chance. If they pulled off whatever it was I’d not hear from them. I was to read the papers, and if I saw anything I could expect a phone call and I was to get hold of my brief. We was thorough. We must a’been. Or you lot wouldn’t have let ’em walk, would you?’
‘We’ll get them.’
‘You’d better.’
‘You wouldn’t consider withdrawing your evidence?’
‘Fuck off, Troy. I’ve told you. I’ve Millie to think of. While she’s got the hope . . . besides, it was more than just me, wasn’t it?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘A feeling. Well . . . more than a feeling. I got told to go to the Yard and make a statement. So I got me brief and I did it. But if I was all they had to get their lyin’ arses off the hook you’d have had me back at the Yard half a dozen times with my brief interrupting you every two seconds, now, wouldn’t you? No, Troy. I reckon you had a piss-poor case. You’ve come to me cos you want confirmation of what you already know. The Ryans blew away Glenda Felucci – you just can’t prove it.’
‘I will. Sooner or later.’
‘Don’t waste your time, Troy. Do London a favour. Take that scum off the streets. Blow them away, if you have to.’
Troy got up from the stool, an ache in his back telling him God never meant man to sit on one in the first place. Alice slipped ahead of him to the door and held it open for him. Watched as he leaned on his stick in the doorway. He could see her expression melt.
He stood in the garden waiting for whatever it was that was taking its time to surface in her.
‘I’m not completely hard, you know. I did hear you got caught in that explosion what killed that copper what sent Alf down.’
‘His name was John Brocklehurst.’
‘I know what it’s like.’
Troy did not ask what ‘it’ was.
‘It was nothin’ to do with us. You do know that, don’t you? There’s not one of Alf’s boys would have done a thing like that.’
Troy said nothing.
‘Could you like, you know . . . send my . . . you know . . . condolences to his wife?’
‘John was a widower, Alice. He had no wife. Just two sons who’ll never see their father again. On the other hand . . . with any luck you’ll see Alf once a month for the next twelve to fifteen years and then you’ll get him back. Older, wiser and knowing how to sew mailbags. That is, if he doesn’t divorce you for the adultery you’ve just put your name to.’
‘He knows I didn’t do that. Besides, I’d divorce the bastard myself if I had grounds.’
Troy looked at the sky. A clear blue summer’s day. Heard again the song of the blackbird. Bach had given way to Delius, a whisper of Brigg Fair. A melody designed to induce soporific happiness, evoking the haze of a summer’s morning, the sound of a skylark, and a hint of anticipation. As English a sound as music and the BBC Third Programme had to offer. A perfect moment to put the boot in.
‘Try desertion,’ he said, heading for the gate.
‘Is it desertion?’
‘Well . . . he’s not here, is he?’
‘Hardly his fault, is it? That’ll get me laughed out of court.’
She was almost shouting now as Troy opened the gate.
‘Then it’s mental cruelty, Alice. Run it by your brief. Tell him how it pushed you to the brink being married to a professional thief, how his life of deception and the revelations at his trial were more than you could bear. Tell him how you nearly lost your mind.’
Nothing in her expression told him she was aware of either the irony or the satire in what he’d said. His last sight of her was her sucking on another fag and mulling the idea over. He’d probably just wrecked what remained of Alf Marx’s marriage. It was worth a smile.
Troy arranged to meet his brother-in-law, Lawrence, the same evening. Lawrence had suggested Troy come to his borrowed rooms at Albany rather than to Fleet Street. Troy had not asked whether Anna would be there. Lawrence had both tact and bravura. Ordinarily one could rely on the former, but Lawrence was not leading an ordinary life. At fifty-something, he was a first-time adulterer. He might just want to brazen it out.
Troy passed Anna in the ropewalk. Another of her flowery summer dresses, not one he’d seen before – some sort of purple daisy pattern – and a shawl for the onset of evening.
‘I’ve been given half a crown and told to go to the pictures. I gather you two have things to discuss that chaps can only discuss en chap as ’twere?’
‘How have you been?’
‘Nothing doing, Troy. If I say I’m sad you’ll gloat. If I say I’m happy you’ll find some scornful one-liner. Let’s talk about the only thing that matters. How are you? You’re looking pretty good, by the bye.’
‘Is that a professional opinion?’
‘Strictly doctor to patient.’
‘My eyesight’s improved no end. I’m not even sure I need the stick any more.’
He tapped one leg gently with the walking stick, in much the way Angus would tap his tin leg to show it rattled.
‘Then if you don’t need it, don’t use it. Has it occurred to you how much of what you’re going through might be simply psychological?’
‘No,’ he replied honestly.
‘The stick is a prop, Troy. And I mean that in the melodramatic sense. Throw it away.’
Anna walked on. He had not taken three steps when she called to him. ‘Troy, it wasn’t you sent Angus haring off to Scotland, was it?’
Lawrence flung the door open, looking every inch a Troy. Braces dangling, tie at half-mast, a bottle of wine in one hand. ‘You’re early. You didn’t, er . . . did you?’
‘We had a bit of a chat, yes.’
‘And now we have our bit of a chat, eh? It’s work, isn’t it? I assumed it was work when you telephoned.’
Lawrence flung himself down in an overstuffed armchair, and yanked the cork out of the bottle. Troy looked around. He’d not been inside Albany in years. It was still intimidating. Everything on the grand, too grand, scale. Everything ordered, in its place. He couldn’t believe it suited Lawrence. Not quite the Spartan quarters of the army officer who was its regular occupant, but simplicity and system in a setting of gilded, bachelor indulgence. What Lawrence was used to was a ramshackle house in Highgate, strewn with books and papers and kids’ toys.
‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing. I used to know the chap lived in the flat below.’
‘I don’t think they call them flats, Freddie. They’re gentlemen’s sets or some such nonsense.’
‘Killed himself about ten years ago.’
‘We’ve both us had a bellyful of suicide lately, so why don’t we change the subject? In fact, let’s get to the subject.’
Troy sat down opposite Lawrence and accepted a large glass of claret. ‘Those chaps who run the Empress. I promised you a story.’
‘So you did.’
‘We’ve talked to them about two murders in the last few weeks. Pulled them for the most recent. Let them go today under habeas corpus.’
‘Pity. I’m damn sure they did it.’
‘You know about them?’
‘Don’t be naïve, Freddie. After our little chat outside the Empress I opened a file on the Ryans. I’ve picked up every bit of chit-chat there is on the street, I’ve greased the palms of more oily narks than I could count. I’ll admit it’s a piss-poor thin file at the moment, but the truth is obvious – the Ryans run the East End nowadays, don’t they? Or are Scotland Yard the last people to discover this?’
‘I rather think that may be true. We’ve been pissing in the dark.’
‘But on the other hand. . .I’ve had nothing about them being pulled. I mean nothing definite. I had assumed they were the two hauled in for the Felucci business, but no one has confirmed that. Your people resorted to the “unnamed suspects” line, as I recall.’
‘Nor will anyone confirm it. Their brief’s running circles round Stan, claiming intimidation or harassment or whatever. We won’t be charging them and we won’t be naming them.’
‘So what’s my “scoop” . . . if I may use such an inadequate term?’
‘I want you to leak your file to every other newspaper in London. I want you to use Fleet Street’s old-boy network and get what the Ryans are up to in every paper in the land. Every paper except yours.’
Lawrence took this remarkably well. Drained his glass, filled it again, stared at his socks, then stared at Troy.
‘Why would I want to do that? We’re streets ahead of the competition on the Ryan story. You can’t just ask me to give it away.’
‘If you let the competition make the running, suggestion, innuendo, gossip, everything but the names, they can whip up a storm. Then when the time comes I will name them and you’ll be the one to break the story.’
‘You’ll name them? But you can’t say when?’
‘No, I can’t.’
‘Supposing they sue?’
‘We’ll have to be prepared for that. But if I catch them first . . .’
‘Catch them? I thought you were still off sick?’
‘I was coming to that.’
It was a pleasure to watch it unfold.
Troy sat, two mornings later, in the sunshine of Goodwin’s Court with all that day’s papers in front of him.
The News Chronicle, the Daily Mail, the Daily Sketch, the Daily Herald, The Times and the Manchester Guardian all played a variation on a theme. How London was rife with rumours to the effect that two young thugs had taken over the East End, had taken possession of an unnamed London club, and had evaded the best efforts of Scotland Yard to catch or prosecute them. They steered clear of the libel law by offering only nebulous hints as to who these men might be. It wasn’t headlining stuff, it was gossip and hence back-page gossip-column material, but it would be a blind man who missed it.
At lunchtime Onions phoned. ‘Have you seen the papers?’
‘Just the Guardian,’ Troy lied.
‘It’s in most of ’em. Not the Express, or the Post but most of ’em. I know, I had Swift Eddie read the lot.’
That might have told Stan something. The Troys owned the Post. It was the weekday version of the much larger Sunday Post that Lawrence edited.
‘D’ye reckon the lad leaked it?’
The lad was Jack. Occasionally Troy wondered what age Jack would have to reach before he’d be anything else to Stan. ‘No, I don’t. Jack would have named them, wouldn’t he? Considering the rage he was in, he wasn’t going to be coy about it. If he’d told the press he’d have named them. And the press would have printed it, wouldn’t they?’
Onions thought about this. Onions did not come from an era in which the criminal looked to his libel lawyer. ‘I suppose you’re right. Doesn’t make it any easier, though. We’ve had that shit of a brief on the phone half the morning. Talked about a smear campaign, and how those two Irish gobshites would be in touch with their MP and all that malarkey.’
‘Ignore him.’
‘I can’t ignore him. It’s way past that stage. I tell you, it’s come to a pretty pass when villains can get their brief to ring up the Yard and boast about their political clout.’
The following day the Daily Express, the London Evening News, the Evening Standard, the Star and the Daily Telegraph joined the fray.
It was Saturday afternoon when Lawrence called Troy.
‘There has been a development. I am invited to dinner by Rod at Church Row this evening.’
‘In what way is that a development?’
‘I am invited to meet Maurice White. And I am invited to meet Ted Steele – Lord Spoon, as you and Rod are wont to call him. The last time I saw Lord Spoon was in the Empress, deep in conversation with the Ryan twins.’
‘You went in? I thought I told you not to?’
‘Grow up, Freddie. Now, do you feel like gate crashing your brother’s dinner party?’
‘If I do that neither Rod nor Spoon will say what it is they have to say. But I’ll be there all the same. And I’ll be listening.’
‘Listening? Where?’
As a child Troy had learnt by the age of five that he could ride from the cellar to the kitchen to the dining room inside the dumb waiter, hauled through the entrails of the house by his elder brother. It was not a favour he could ever repay. Rod was always too big to haul anywhere. By the age of eight he had discovered that being packed off to bed while the grown-ups entertained – Rod at fifteen now counting as a grown-up – had its compensations. When the ladies retired the cook usually took to her chair and slept for half an hour in front of the range. A boy well placed with his body scrunched into the dumb waiter could hear all that the gentlemen had to say over the cigars and brandy. In this fashion Troy had been made privy to the thoughts of Lloyd George in 1926, and some ten years and countless eavesdroppings later, to the thoughts of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the new Reich ambassador to St James’s – or, as his father had called him, ‘that fucking Nazi’.
It was a matter of chance. When the terms of his father’s will dictated that the Church Row house in Hampstead be given to Rod, no one had argued. It was big enough for them all. What did it matter whose name was on the deeds? By then Troy had his terraced cottage in Goodwin’s Court, Masha and Lawrence had their house in Highgate, and Sasha’s money had bought Hugh what Hugh thought suited his position in society, a house in Lord North Street, so handy for the House of Lords. All the same, Troy had never quite got round to surrendering the keys his father had given him on his sixteenth birthday in 1931.Since Rod had taken up residence he had always rung the bell, and tried not to take his hospitality for granted – something Rod did all the time with Troy’s house in Mimram.
On the Saturday evening, Troy used the key for the first time in fifteen years and let himself in quietly. There would be no cook to outwit, just Rod’s wife Cid.
He approached the dining-room door. There was a crack in one of the upper panels, just about level with the eyes of an eight-year-old.
He peeked in. They were on pudding. And the only woman present was Cid. Troy doubted they would have had whatever conversation Lawrence had been summoned for with Cid in the room. She had ways of discouraging men from talking shop. When she left – ‘retired’ was scarcely the word to use in this day and age – they’d get to whatever it was. Troy went down to the kitchen and gently slid up the hatch on the dumb-waiter.
As he turned round he found himself face to face with his sister-in law, mouth open ready to scream. He clapped a hand over her mouth and waited as she clocked who he was.
‘You lunatic, Freddie. You nearly scared me half to death. What are you doing down here in the dark? Come to think of it, what are you doing here at all?’
‘I came,’ he whispered, ‘for the cigars and brandy.’
‘Oh. You mean the conspiracy? I might have known.’
‘Is it a conspiracy?’
‘What else would you call it? No wives invited and dinner-table conversation that would bore the bum off a rhino. Of course it’s a conspiracy. Rod is up to something. I don’t know what and I don’t want to know what. But you do, don’t you?’
‘’Fraid so.’
‘Well, I’m not staying up for it. Whatever it is, please don’t let Rod make a bigger fool of himself than is necessary. I’m off to bed.’
Troy was far too big to sit inside the dumb-waiter any more. He pulled up a chair and stuck his head into the shaft. He could hear perfectly – all that was required was to overcome the sensation that he was on the guillotine waiting for the chop. Rod had only to choose this moment to send a cold terrine back down . . . He wondered how the ice would be broken and by whom.
He even heard the scratch of a match as one of them lit up a cigar. Probably Maurice White, he thought. And it was Maurice who spoke first.
‘It’s very good of you to agree to meet us at short notice, Lawrence.’
‘I’d be a poor excuse for a hack if I couldn’t smell a story, Maurice.’
‘It’s not so much a story,’ Rod said. ‘It’s a . . .’
Troy knew his brother would never get to the end of that sentence. He always fluffed his lines when he was feeling guilty about something.
Maurice bailed him out. ‘I’m not sure it’s a story either. I’d prefer to think of it as a party matter. After all, we’re all members of the Labour Party. Aren’t we?’
Nobody said yes to the obvious.
‘And it’s less about creating a story than correcting one.’
‘Really? I can hardly begin to guess what you mean, Maurice.’
Rod found his voice again. ‘It’s a long story . . .’
‘Which one? The one we’re correcting or the one I’m creating?’
Rod doggedly ignored this.
‘We, that is the Party, mean to come into office with a committed programme of urban renewal. That’s hardly surprising. It’s been in every manifesto since the war and it’ll be in the next one.’
‘Why does that not sound like success?’
Rod ignored this too. It was the kind of remark that usually had him saying things like ‘I’ll knock your block off.’
‘A few weeks ago Maurice approached me with a project for redeveloping a site in the East End.’
‘You mean a bombsite?’
‘No,’ Maurice chipped in. ‘We mean the redevelopment of slums.’
‘Knocking houses down? When London has its biggest housing shortage since 1940?’
‘Knocking ’em down, Lawrence, and rebuilding ’em.’
‘I see . . . and where is this site?’
‘Watney Market. My manor. I was born there.’
‘And you want the next government, the next Labour government, to rubber-stamp this?’
Rod again: ‘It’ll be more than that. It’ll be a sort of partnership.’
‘A partnership? Between a Labour government and venture capital?’
Troy could almost feel Rod gagging on his Calvados.
‘Doesn’t sound exactly socialist to me, Rod.’
‘It’s not incompatible either. Think of it as a Public–Private Partnership.’
‘I’ll try, but it sounds to me like an acronym in the making, and a recipe for a scam.’
Ted Spoon spoke for the first time. ‘It’s detail, Lawrence, merely detail. We wish to be the contractors for this project. There’s no reason why we cannot build decent homes for working people. We are self-made men who simply want to put something back into the community. As a Fleet Street editor you are familiar with the work and lives of both Maurice and myself, if only for the purposes of writing our obituaries at some distant date.’
‘I wrote yours myself last summer, Ted. We try to plan ahead.’
Whether he meant to or not, Lawrence had broken the tension. Ted Spoon laughed out loud and Maurice and Rod joined in. As the laughter died down, Troy heard the clink of the brandy bottle doing the rounds. Rod’s sense of relief was almost palpable.
Someone complimented Rod on the brandy, sotto voce. Someone coughed loudly, and Spoon picked up where he’d left off, but with a lighter tone in his voice. ‘We’re both working-class boys made good, Lawrence. We’ve given away millions. Simple charity. Almost effortless. Sign a cheque and salve your conscience. It’s almost too easy. This . . . this is a project that takes us back to our roots. It’s a real chance to do something for a whole community.’
‘I see. And you want me to write something about this?’
‘I would be only too happy if you did, but no. Maurice was right when he said this is less the creating of a story than the correcting of one.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Lawrence lied, like Troy. ‘I don’t quite follow.’
Maurice took over. ‘You can hardly have missed the rumours about gangland villainy. It’s been in all the papers.’
‘All the papers except yours,’ said Rod, and Troy wondered about the curious path of genes: that his own father could have produced an eldest son capable of such stupidity, of such gaffe-making, foot-in-gob stupidity.
Lawrence said nothing, forcing Maurice to spell it out.
‘All those rumours concern two brothers called Lorcan and Patrick Ryan. They’re Danny Ryan’s younger brothers. They run several businesses out of Watney Market, and the rumour about them owning a nightclub up West is also true. Danny’s done very well since the war and so have his brothers. They’re partners in this project too.’
‘All of them? Danny too?’
‘No, not Danny.’
‘I see. And what is it you want me to do?’
‘We want you to print the truth.’
‘I always print the truth.’
Spoon again: ‘We came to you because you alone of the Fleet Street editors have chosen not to repeat these groundless rumours.’
‘Groundless? Perhaps. But if you ask me to refute I will inevitably have to repeat in order to refute. I cannot deny what I do not know to be false.’
‘Trust me,’ Maurice ventured. ‘It’s all lies.’
‘You know, Maurice, when someone says, “Trust me,” my journalist’s hackles rise.’
‘Lawrence, all the stories are bollocks. I know these people. I grew up among them. It’s a case of give a dog a bad name. You come from a place like Watney Market and trouble comes looking for you the minute you set foot out of the door. You don’t need to be bad: bad is the condition of living. I have a juvenile record meself, but I made good. And I can tell you now, the Ryan twins have no worse a record than I do. We’ve all been there. What I’ve seen in the papers in the last few weeks is a refusal to let working-class kids grow up and clean up. I don’t wholly blame the press for that. I blame the police, who seem to want to pin everything that goes down in East London on them. The truth is, there’s something in our society that cannot bear to see a kid from the slums make good, something that will always rake up their background and use it against them. That’s why we’re Labour. All of us, you, me, Rod and Ted. Because we don’t believe a man is damned by his beginnings. We believe in making good, we believe in equality and we believe in meritocracy. We take the Ryans on their merits. In a project like this we need local knowledge. Men who can speak for the community. Without the Ryans we’ve got a project, that I can’t deny, but without them it doesn’t connect to the lives of the people in that community. If we don’t get that local involvement then we might as well be a company from America or Germany just steaming in, knocking down and building up. Bricks and mortar, sure, but the life wouldn’t be there. We need these men. We need men like these men. Put simply, they’re being slandered.’
‘No, Maurice, they’re not. Not until someone names them.’
‘OK – all but slandered, a gnat’s bollock away from slandered. But they’re good blokes, we need ’em. There has to be some way to set the record straight.’
It was a stunning speech. Rod would have been jealous of Maurice on the hustings. Troy could not see his brother-in-law falling for it for one second.
‘Rough diamonds, eh, Maurice?’
‘If you like. I’d call ’em a new breed of entrepreneur. But rough diamond sounds kosher enough for me.’
‘Maurice, I’m a working-class kid. Don’t let the accent and the tie fool you. Listen to my surname. Stafford was Steafaoin when my dad was fresh off the boat in 1899. I was the sort of kid who could pass exams. I got a scholarship to Merchant Taylor’s, and then a scholarship to Oxford. An education that my family could no more have paid for than they could have bought the moon. I’ve no more ignored or forgotten my origins than you have and, like you, I’ve the odd blot on my record as a child. Things I did that I deeply regret and that I’ll be embarrassed to see in my own obituary if the buggers I work with are ever so crass as to show it to me. But the past is a foreign country. No one spreads rumours about me being involved in rackets. And to ask me to accept that the level of rumour that now engulfs London is simply the result of some sort of class prejudice or police conspiracy against two upright citizens is beyond belief. I don’t know what you think I can do for you. But it isn’t creating or correcting a story, it’s killing a story. A story is either an abortion or a living, breathing, kicking, screaming thing with a life of its own. I don’t know how you kill it. And there’s nothing you can say would ever make me want to try.’
Troy knew an exit line when he heard one. The meeting was surely over. Lawrence had just fired the final broadside. Time to make himself known. He raced upstairs and sat on the bottom step of the next flight trying to give the impression that he’d been there for some time. When the dining-room door opened, Rod emerged followed by Lawrence. He was clearly about to utter some sort of apology to Lawrence when he noticed Troy. ‘How long have you been there?’
‘Long enough,’ said Troy.
‘Are you going into town, Freddie?’ Lawrence said. ‘We could share acab.’
They ducked out sharply. Neither of them turned round, but Troy knew that Rod was standing on the doorstep staring at them all the way to the end of the road.
Lawrence flagged a cab. ‘Your place or mine?’
‘I think it’s time we went to your office. Two cups of coffee and a typewriter, and tell them to hold the morning edition.’
‘Fleet Street,’ Lawrence said to the cabbie.
When they’d moved off Lawrence said nothing for a while. As they came within sight of King’s Cross he said, ‘Is that what you wanted?’
‘Wanted?’ said Troy. ‘It’s certainly not what I expected. Although Rod’s capacity to behave like an ass should surprise neither of us.’
This seemed to hit the mark. There was thinly held rage in Lawrence’s next remark: ‘What did those stupid buggers expect me to do? They call in the editor of a national newspaper to ask him to kill a story that’s already the talk of the town? And I have to sit there and listen to Rod defend the reputations of a couple of crooks? What the hell was he thinking?’
‘I think you could say he wasn’t thinking. That’s the problem. Rod is a believer. The number of things in which he is willing to believe, either temporarily or as a matter of lifelong commitment, are legion. One of which is that, by and large, people tell him the truth.’
‘Since you put it that way . . . I still find it hard to believe you’re related. And I’ve known the two of you for twenty-five years.’
Troy talked. Lawrence typed. Troy was envious of the electric typewriter. At the Yard only Onions’s secretary had anything so modern. Most coppers, Swift Eddie excepted, typed badly with two fingers. Lawrence could type quicker than Troy could think.
Every so often a girl with a ponytail and a flared skirt would bring them coffee. At ten to two on the Sunday morning she brought no coffee but tapped on the glass face of her wristwatch.
‘She thinks we’re cutting it fine,’ Lawrence said. ‘That’s OK. I think I’ve finished.’
The Sunday Post
I speak as an outsider, as many of my critics would surely remind me, were I not so pre-emptive, but rarely in my years in London have I been witness to such a tidal surge in rumour, to the manufacture of stories seemingly without detail or substance. I am put in mind of the ingenious fabrications of Titus Oates – no, not that one, the other one – but the elaborate lies of an individual, however much believed, cannot fairly be compared to what appears to be a collective body of opinion that has set itself to the half-telling of a tale. And therein lies the problem. Why is this tale of which we have all read in the last week only half told?
To avoid confusion, permit me to essay a short summary of the rumour that appears to have seized Fleet Street. There is a new power in the criminal underworld. Following the conviction of one Alfred Marx, whose deeds my papers have reported at length elsewhere, a new, younger breed of thug has taken control of the East End of London. Not content with this, they are said to have taken over by force one of Mayfair’s more fashionable nightclubs, and to have entertained there members of both Houses of Parliament. Furthermore, the interest of the police in these men has led to no charges – yet the rumours persist that these men are responsible for two, and possibly three murders in recent weeks. I doubt any of you would argue with my summary, terse though it is.
My point, however, is not simply to repeat the rumour and list the allegations. It is to ask questions. Where, if not with Scotland Yard itself, do these rumours originate? If these men are responsible, why have they not been charged? If they are not responsible, why have the gentlemen of Fleet Street been made privy to what I can only describe as an ullage of information and disinformation? There is something wrong with both our press and police force if the relationship has turned into an unproductive symbiosis. It surely runs counter to the public interest.
Hence I say to Scotland Yard – charge these men or stop feeding the grinding wheels of rumour.
Hence I say to my colleagues in Fleet Street, name these men and take the consequences or stop doing the bidding of an inefficient ally who, having failed in the course of natural justice, is seeking the mere appearance of justice by other means.
And, since it has ever been this paper’s policy not to ask of others what it would not readily give itself, the men in question are Patrick and Lorcan Ryan of Watney Market in Shadwell. The club they are said to own is the Empress, in Mayfair, and the company they keep includes such luminaries as Edward, Lord Steele and Mr Maurice White.
Troy hesitated over the last name. Lawrence had stopped typing and was waiting, fingers poised to hear if there was going to be more. Troy wasn’t naming Driberg. Lawrence was refraining from reminding him of this. Troy was not going to name Driberg. Perhaps he owed him that favour. And there remained the problem of the signature. It seemed just a tad too much to expect Lawrence to put his name to this, even though he undoubtedly would if asked. Troy certainly couldn’t sign it himself. And he had dictated it, consciously or not, in the style, the particular style, of one journalist. No, there was only one name that would do. He leaned over Lawrence and typed with two fingers . . .
Alexei Troy
‘Are you sure?’ said Lawrence.
‘It’s what my father would have done. What he would have said.’
‘Really? I’m not sure Alex would have known a word like “symbiosis”. I had to think how to spell it myself.’
‘If he’d known the Russian for it, then he would also have known the English.’
Lawrence tore the page from the roller and glanced quickly down it with the eye of an accomplished speed-reader. ‘Rod’ll play hell.’
‘Let him.’
‘You know, I’ve never published a piece under the name of a man who’s been dead for fifteen years before.’
Troy said nothing.
‘But . . . we’ll do it. If they sue they sue.’
‘We can afford it. Besides, we haven’t libelled either Spoon or Maurice. They won’t like it but it’s hardly libel. They do keep the company of the Ryans. You and I have both seen Spoon with them. And I doubt there’ll be any shortage of witnesses to their relationship with Maurice. The only people who can possibly sue are the Ryans. Even then I’m not sure it’s libellous. We’re not saying they’re crooks. We’re printing what might be called common knowledge.’
‘Au contraire – I think it’s uncommon knowledge. And I’d hate to be the one to go into court and claim gossip and tittle-tattle as prior publication.’
Troy said nothing.
‘And, of course, all my so-called colleagues in Fleet Street will tell me I stitched them up.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It’s dog eat dog and they know it.’
Troy had just yanked his copy of the Post from the letter-box. He had set down his first cup of coffee of the day and had flipped forward to see his father’s name in print once more. It worked. It worked magnificently. It filled half a column on the left-hand side of page twelve, and it made his skin rise up in goose pimples. He had brought the past to life when he set his hand to signing that name, and put a shiver up his own spine. The telephone rang. It was Rod. Of course it was Rod. But in his present mood he would not have been much surprised to hear his father’s voice.
‘You shit. You conniving little shit!’
‘What makes you think it was me?’
‘Lawrence would never have used the old man’s name! You shit, you—’
Troy hung up on him.
Ten minutes later he had reread his first piece of journalism since his own stint on the Post in 1934 and found he had no regrets. The phone rang again. It was Onions.
‘How are you?’
‘OK.’
‘Good. Get yourself over the Yard. The MO wants to see you.’
‘On a Sunday?’
‘I want you back on the force before the day’s over. Get to the MO and get yourself signed off.’
‘Supposing he—’
‘He’ll do what he’s bloody well told.’
‘Fine,’ said Troy, expecting Stan to ring off. But he didn’t. Troy could hear the lurking sentence.
‘You couldn’t have stopped him?’
‘Stan, even if I’d known what Lawrence was up to I would have had no way of stopping him. He doesn’t work for me. He doesn’t work for Rod.’
‘I work for the bloody Home Secretary. He’s been kicking my arse all morning. Just get signed off and get back.’
Then he did ring off.
A small voice in Troy’s head said, ‘Game and set.’ Nothing would make him invoke the hubris of ‘match’.
He was shaving when the phone rang yet again.
Rod said, ‘Just tell me what you know. I can’t pretend Ted Spoon is a friend, but he’s a colleague. Like it or not.’
‘It’s quite simple. Mo and Spoon are putting money into development for profit. Watney Street is ripe for the picking. In fact, if they get all the necessary permissions, there is not only a gold-plated business opportunity, there is the possibility of government funds to assist in their fleecing of the East End. They’ll bulldoze the houses, stick the families in high rises and say bollocks to the notion of community. Your so-called public-private partnership just allows them to fleece the taxpayer twice over. Or were you kidding yourself your hand-outs to Mo and Spoon somehow wouldn’t end up in their pockets? It’s too rich to walk away from, or let anyone deter them. Hence they need you. You could be in government any day now – I seem to hear that phrase with an awful regularity. Hence they will deal with gangsters . . . The Ryans are gangsters, they run Watney Street, so Mo and Spoon are paying off the Ryans, in money and protection. Protection works both ways. The Ryans deal in East End protection – “Pay us or we will become the people from whom you need protection.” Mo and Spoon offer the other protection. “Get into bed with us and we will deliver cover for you. We have the ear of Rod Troy, we have the ear of Lawrence Stafford.” Haven’t you worked this out, or has the political prospect of putting one over on the Tories and finally getting the East End into shape blinded you?’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘When Maurice White calls someone a rough diamond he means the man is armed and dangerous. The plain fact of the matter is that Mo and Spoon are courting a couple of murderers. And they know it. I don’t know what cock-and-bull story Maurice came to you with, but you’ve behaved like an ass, a first-rate, bone-headed, gullible ass. He flattered your messianic sensibility, the overweening notion you’ve had all your life that you can set the world to rights. All Lawrence and I did was clear the board so you can see who the players are. Anyone who wants to do business with the Ryans can no longer pretend there isn’t an issue. The bluff Mo tried to pull on you last night won’t ever work again. You know what Maurice White is? I’ll tell you. Kitty’s little brother summed him up nicely at old Edna’s funeral. He said, “Mo’s the man who sold the world.” I could not put it better.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
Rod went silent. All Troy could hear was his breathing. The thought that perhaps he had hit too far below the belt approached his consciousness and crept away again. At last Rod said, ‘And Ted Spoon. What is he?’
‘I don’t know – yet.’
Sarcasm was nothing. Troy could handle sarcasm.
‘I can’t tell you how honoured I am, Chief Superintendent, that you have consented to consult a doctor for the living instead of the Polish ghoul you are wont to favour with your custom. Forgive me if I feel for a pulse. It’s a habit of mine.’
Troy wondered how Sir Ronald Middleton MD, chief medical officer to Scotland Yard, would look with a black eye, and said nothing.
‘I’ve been told to put you back on the force, as I’ve no doubt you know. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to give you the works.’
Middleton held Troy by the wrist and gazed down at a large pocket watch with a sweeping second hand. Then he let the wrist drop and neatly swung the watch back into the pocket of his waistcoat like the music-hall comic Jimmy Edwards. Clearly he’d practised this for hours.
‘Fifty-six,’ he said.
‘Healthy,’ said Troy.
‘A wee bit on the low side. You should be feeling stress right now, natural stress at being in someone else’s hands. A slightly elevated heart-rate would be normal.’
He had one of those pinpoint torch things in his hands now and was shining it first into Troy’s eyes and then into his ears.
‘But you’re not normal, are you, Mr Troy? You’re odd. You’re the clever dick who thinks the rules were made for someone else. Shirt off.’
Middleton tapped on Troy’s naked chest. Listened through the cold end of his stethoscope. Fingered an old scar on his ribcage. ‘Potato peeler, wasn’t it?’ The bastard was smiling now. ‘Or did you think there were secrets at Scotland Yard?’
Troy was definitely going to thump this sod.
‘Drop your trousers.’
‘Is this really necessary?’
‘Drop ’em, Mr Troy. And when I say cough try your best to oblige me.’
When it was all over and Middleton had exacted a pound of flesh in ritual humiliation, Troy was tying his tie, and Middleton was jotting notes into a file and talking without looking at him.
‘There’s good news and bad news.’
‘And?’
‘Well, the good is that I can pass you back to active service without having to tell the commissioner that it’s against my better judgement and advice. You’re fit, Mr Troy. Surprisingly fit.’
‘So what’s the bad news?’
Middleton looked up. The cat that had got at the cream. ‘You’ve been that way for a while. I’d estimate you’ve been a1 for at least a couple of weeks. If you’d come to see me then instead of wasting your time with Dr Death, you’d have been back on the force a while ago.’
‘But . . . I haven’t felt well.’
‘Purely psychological, Mr Troy. All you needed was the prospect of work to make your mind shape up as your body has done. That, after all, is the trouble with the dead – they have bodies, they no longer have minds.’
Middleton slid his glasses way down his nose and looked at Troy over the top. He held out a stamped form. ‘Just let the commissioner have this. Good day to you, Mr Troy.’
On automatic pilot, the following morning, Troy slipped his glasses into his top pocket and was reaching for the walking-stick by the hallstand when it hit him – perfect balance, 20/20 vision, a steady hand that stretched out for the walking-stick without so much as a hint of a tremor. Middleton had been right. All he’d needed was to be told. Anna had been right. If she ever listened to him again, he’d tell her as much.
Swift Eddie Clark and Mary McDiarmuid were waiting for him when he got into work. A cup of hot black coffee and a smile.
‘Lose the uniform,’ Troy said to Mary.
‘What?’
‘You’re a detective. Civvies from now on. No point in looking as though you’re on crossing duty.’
Troy stood behind his desk. Looked around. There was blank white paper on his blotting pad, ink in his inkwell, a neat array of ballpoint pens, a glass ashtray full of paperclips, an empty out-tray, a single hand written note in the in-tray: ‘I’ve sent a copy of my report to your GP. Good luck, Mr Troy – Ronald Middleton.’
Troy decided to take it in the spirit in which it had surely been intended. It was congratulation and warning in a single sentence. The old man’s way of saying, ‘Don’t overdo it.’ Normal service had been resumed. It was as close to bliss as man ever came.
He sat down, lord of most of what he surveyed, palms flat on the worn leather of his desktop. They were staring at him. Standing like Harbottle and Albert.
‘Well?’
Mary McDiarmuid and Eddie exchanged glances.
Mary McDiarmuid said, ‘Orders, boss?’
Orders? He’d almost forgotten how to give orders. ‘What are you working on?’
‘Mr Wildeve has me cross-referencing missing persons with the files on those two cut-up boys. Do you want to see it?’
‘Not yet. What I want is everything on the Ryans, the Feluccis and Joey Rork.’
‘I’ve got those,’ said Swift Eddie. ‘Mr Wildeve sent them over last night.’ Less than a minute later he dumped a pile of brown folders on Troy’s desk.
‘I’m still working on the commissioner’s manpower review.’
‘How long? I need you now. In fact, I need you to put on your old mac and do some footwork.’
‘Me mac? In this weather?’
‘It was a metaphor.’
‘Footwork?’
Given his preferences not only would Swift Eddie never leave his desk, he’d have a camp-bed, a Primus stove and sleep in his office.
‘A nice stroll around Stepney.’
Eddie looked deeply disappointed with his lot. Assumed an air of oppression and misery. It was his front, his way of getting people to make demands on others instead of on him. Troy had seen it a thousand times. He stared Eddie down in a matter of seconds.
‘I’ll be shut of it tomorrow.’
‘OK. Just tell me when.’
Troy began to sift through the pile. There was so little, he thought, so little of any substance. It was a poor showing after weeks of investigation. There was almost nothing in any of the files he didn’t know already. But for the last item in Rork’s file.
Troy picked up a blue page. The note clipped to it read ‘Brought in by F. Jones prop. Cromarty Hotel 4th August.’ That was more than a fortnight after Gumshoe had died. It was an aerogramme, an innocent-looking – Troy thought it had been chosen for just this effect – missive. A large sheet of sky-blue paper, almost tissue-thin, folded over five times and gummed along the three outer edges. It was postmarked Washington DC, 15 July, and it had neither a date nor a return address on the letterhead. It looked to have been typed on a portable by a man not accustomed to typing or Tippex.
Dear Joe,
It may be a while before you get this. I’m not epredd expressing it or anything conspicuous and, needless to say, if you ever get anyone asking you how you came by it you’re on your own. Sorry kid. That’s just the way it is.
This is what I could find out and pretty much how things roll out. The lovely Kate is rummaging around in the top drawer yet again. But – she would wouldn’t she?
First – Tom Driberg. He’s a member of their parliament, but I guess you know that. An MP since the war. Typical Engilsm Englishman. Public school. Oxford – all the right moves in all the right places. In short we have nothing you couldn’t have learnt from Who’s Who. A maverick pain in the ass is all we know. All the right moves, but not all the right noises. Not favoured by the present leaderhsi leadership. And not the likely lover for Katie – for ‘typical Englishman’ read querr.
Daniel Ryan. Nothing. There isn’ta file of any kind.
Frederick Troy. Nothing per se . . . but there’s a closed file on his old man that reads like Dashiel Hammet meets Buldog Drummond.
Alexei Troy, born Troitsky, in Russia in God knows-when, died 1943. They – and remme remember this pre-dates the CIA by yard and a half so it’s mostly what Hoover and the Feds thought was worth passing on – had all the suspcions and none of the proof. Red or White or candy-stripe like a goddam barber pole? Whatever. The guy left Russia in 1905, got to England in 1910, built up a newspaper and publishing empire – sizeable interersts here too – second only to Beaverbrook. Only time the file showed a glimmer was in 1941 when he broke the story of the German inavs invasion of Russia before it actualy happened. Took some reading between the lines but it’s clear that he knew. No conclsuion drawn, you didn’t have to be a stargazer to see that one coming. His other son is a top man in the opposition. Looks to be in the next cabinet the way things are going – war hero (worked with Ike in 1944 and is still friendly), champion of the poor, all that stuff. The guy you ask about is a copper right? He’s just noted as ‘and son’ on a visit to NY in the twenties. But if he’s a Lodn London bobby he’s got to be straight, right? Right. But . . . I was in London during the Berlin Crisis in ’48. And I kind of think this guy is the same Frederick Troy who busted Johnnie Baumgarner. In which case that we don’t have file with his name on it is kind of remrakble. The way I heard it, and every other agent in Lodn London for that matter, was that this Troy pointed a gun at Johnnie’s head and dared him to reach for his. Like he’d have killed Johnnie without a second thought? Quien sabe? Whatever – just watch your step.
Lord Edward Steele. Take a drink, Joe. Sit yourself down. You’ll be here a while. The file was half an inch thick. Born (we think) Erdrich Strelnitz, Strelnik(c otional)z or Strelnikov in either Czech Bohemia or Hungary circa 1908/1910. Could be Jewish, but he’s denied that often enough. Nothing more known before 1946 when he arrived in England from France, speaking perfrect perfect English and toting enough money to start his own business. The Brits give him a passport at once, no questions asked, from which Langley deduces that he was working for them throuhghout the war. The sort of thing tha could easily be checked, but nobody has. Would also explain the money – some sort of scam appropriating Resistance funds supplied by the Brits, maybe a bit of judiscu judicious looting – who knows? Starts cheap restaurants, like soup kitchens, moves into catering as a whole and insofar as the British have any food faster than fish and chips (you tried that yet?) he was the king of fast food by 1950. Givn the state of their food rations in those days, a smart move. Fortune estimated at several million, and that’s pounds not dollars. Now he’s into everything, construction, investmnt, you name it. MP for Nottingham (as in Sherriff of) 1951–55 (yyou have t ask yiuself did he get bored?). Knighted 1955, a lordship or whatever they call it New Year’s honours last year. Now – he was the choice of the Labour Party. Unlike the Driberg guy he really is in favour.
So far, so god. But here’s the stingeroo. He’s on our payroll. Has been since ’48. No real idea what he does but he does it. Anyway your guess will be the same as mine – he finks on the Brits. After all sombody has to, they tell us sweet fuck all at the best of times. Langley think he’son the take from the Israelis as well, and seem not much bothered by this even though they may not be the only ones keeping Lord Ed in the manner to which. He is very well connected. He visited Ike at the White House in ’53, and got introduced to the Veep too. That one seems to have blossomed. He and Dick Nixon have met half a dozen times since ’53. He has stayed with Pat and Dick and the fucking spaniel in Florida and Pat and Dick (not the spaniel) have stayed with Lord Ed at his stately type home in England. I doubt that Dicky knows the connection to Langley – it would be unlike Ike to tell his Veep so much as a sukk syllable more than he has to – but that hardly matters. Thing is, Nixon is a creep, has a finger in every pie, he has more angles than a romb rhomboid (or do I mean a trapezoid? fuck me i spelled that right!) and is paid off by more crooks and mobsters than you could cram into Joliet with a team of meatpackers. By the company hekeeps. . .?
If the lovely Kate Cormack is getting herself mixed up with Steele and guys like Steels then I can see the Deeks crapping themselves. Jesus, Joey, that woman is . . . what do the Brits say? . . . a wagonload of monkeys. Two racoons in a burlap sack if you see what I mean. Personally I have every intention of voting for Senator Cormack (anyone’s better than Dicky), but we could end up with a First Lady who is a major embara embarrasm . . . fukit!!! – embarrassment. ‘First Lady Fucks Brit Spook’– not a headline you’d want to read. Bring back Dolly Madison.
Watch yourself old buddy . . . whoever this Limey pal of yours is who said Lord Ed was a ‘total twat’ is wrong, dead wrong . . . now burn this.
‘Your Old Pal Pete’
Troy knew the reference. There was a Ring Lardner story in which a man spread mischief and slander by writing to total strangers and signing off ‘Your Old Pal Pete’. Or was it Al? Maybe it wasn’t Lardner, maybe it was Twain corrupting Hadleyburg? Either way it was obvious Pete was not his real name and it was pointless even to try and find out – he wouldn’t know where to begin. All that mattered was that Gumshoe had had a friend in Washington who could dish the dirt. He did not know whether to be flattered or surprised that Rork had included him in the enquiry. There’d been no mention of Angus. Perhaps Angus was so obviously, so crankily harmless.
Troy yelled for Swift Eddie.
‘Why wasn’t I shown this?’
Eddie sat down opposite Troy, took the sheet of paper from his hand, read it in a single take and passed it back.
‘I thought we had a deal, Eddie?’
‘Indeed, sir. But Mr Wildeve was concerned not to bother you with things that lead nowhere.’
‘Lead nowhere?’
‘His exact words, sir.’
‘Really?’
‘Do you think it leads anywhere?’ said Eddie, in a tone that implied he knew damn well it didn’t.
Troy said nothing.
‘Mr Wildeve also said, sir, that it was your wont to go ferreting around in spook stuff into which he and I would eventually get dragged and he was, and I quote, “on me tod”, he decided to let you find out in your own time.’
‘Dragged in?’
‘We all kid ourselves about one thing or another, sir.’
‘It’s not that it doesn’t lead anywhere, Eddie, of course it doesn’t. But it’s another card in the hand, isn’t it? Having the dope on Lord Spoon might come in rather handy.’
‘Mr Wildeve said that too, sir. I think it’s what bothered him most. What do you intend to do with the info now, if you don’t mind me asking, sir?’
‘I’ll think of something.’
He folded the aerogramme back into its compact form and shoved it in a pocket. It was too precious to leave in a desk drawer. It wasn’t so much a card in the hand as an ace in the hole.
Predictably Onions had every nagging phone call redirected to Troy’s office. Every half-hour or so Mary McDiarmuid would ring him with the Mail or the Standard – for whom Troy had a standard line. The press did not dictate the investigations of the Metropolitan Police Force. If they had evidence they should bring it forward now or risk a charge of obstructing the course of justice. If they did not have evidence and wished to publish items on the Ryan twins, then that was between them, the Ryans and the laws of libel. This shut no one up, occasionally produced laughter, and, from a reporter on his family’s Evening Herald, produced a knowing snigger.
But there were also the politicians. The bigwigs had had their say to Onions. It was the also-sat, the back-bench green-leather arse-polishers who now phoned Troy. Most East London MPs sought some form of reassurance, banging on about ‘descent of the area into lawlessness’, ‘mob rule’, ‘the bobby on the beat’ and so on. Troy resorted to the meaningless brush-off as practised by the royals, ‘Something will be done.’ Then a Conservative M P, Sir Albert Stokes: Marylebone South, telephoned. Troy was thinking that he’d seen enough knights lately to last a lifetime and was wondering what this might have to do with Sir Albert when it dawned on him. The Empress club was in his constituency. He heard Troy’s platitudes with good grace and, just when Troy thought he was about to ring off, said, ‘You’re not related to the other Troy, are you?’
‘What other Troy?’ said Troy.
Then Les Gidney called. Les was the Labour MP for Stepney. Watney Street, the Ryans’ home and garage were all in his constituency. He was, de facto, the MP to whom the Ryans should complain if their boast to Onions had meant anything. Troy wasn’t at all sure they had – not that that meant they wouldn’t. Troy knew Les slightly. Another 1945 man, elected straight from khaki. A plain, working-class bloke, not at all easy with the likes of Rod and Gaitskell and their public-school socialism, but, Troy thought, one of the good guys.
‘I’ll get them, Les.’
‘I don’t doubt it. But it is baffling.’
‘What is?’
‘It’s a sort of circle game. Wheels within wheels, that sort of thing. It’s only a few weeks back that Mo White was wanting me to meet them to talk about what he called “development opportunities around Watney Market”. And then just a few days ago Rod suggested I come to a meeting with him and Mo and Ted Steele. I said no to both.’
‘The Ryans’ reputation preceded them?’
‘No, Freddie. Not all. Truth to tell I’d never even heard of them. That alone is worrying. And, needless to say, I’ve heard from them rather too much lately. If it were left to them I’d spend the rest of my time in Parliament writing outraged letters to the commissioner. But, no, I turned down both meetings because I know Mo White, known him all my life. And I trust him about as far as I could chuck him.’
‘Les, Stepney has a new detective inspector.’
‘I heard. Has this anything to do with anything? I knew Paddy Milligan. I thought he was all right.’
‘He is. Family troubles. He wanted a transfer back to Lancashire. The new chap’s called Ray Godbehere. Why don’t you introduce yourself? See he meets the people a new DDI should meet?’
When Mary McDiarmuid announced a Dick Goldblatt, Troy called a halt to it. ‘Isn’t he the Tory for Golders Green?’
‘I think it’s Neasden, boss. And I rather think that’s Goldfarb. This chap said Goldblatt.’
‘What’s the difference? Get a number and tell him I’ll call him back.’
‘Will you?’
‘No.’
He liked the feeling. An old feeling rendered anew. Made fresh. To get home after a day’s work. To find the evening still light, to have a cup of tea whilst listening to the news on the Home Service, and then to sit in the yard with a glass of wine and the evening paper and watch dusk creep over London. He could do this any day and, indeed, had done so most days this summer, but without the solid sense of a day’s work behind him it wasn’t the same. He liked the feeling that he might have earned it.
Troy was ready. He had heard enough of the day’s news – once Parliament no longer sat, the press, wireless and television were held to be in what was called the ‘silly season’. Licensed trivia. Lots of statistics about cricket and the weather. It seemed to begin just after Wimbledon fortnight and the term struck Troy as arsy-versy. Politics was a very long, very silly season. He had the folding chair tucked under one arm, a glass of Chaˆteau Bouvard-Pecuchet ’46 in one hand and the other outstretched to the latch, when someone knocked at the door. Bugger.
A stout bloke in his late forties, overdressed for the weather and gleaming with sweat, stood in the yard. He had an attaché case dangling at the end of one arm, and looked as though his day had been a hard one. Troy was not about to make it softer.
‘Mr Troy? I’m Representative Dick Goldblatt.’
Representative of what? Troy thought better of asking. ‘I’m sorry, I never buy on the doorstep. I’ve all the brushes I need and I’ve never really wanted a subscription to the Reader’s Digest.’
The stout bloke drew himself up, took the sagginess out of his posture, the better to stand on dignity. He was taller than he’d seemed. Troy hoped he wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness.
‘I’m Representative Dick Goldblatt of the 103rd District of New York.’
‘You mean you’re a Congressman?’
‘I thought I just said that.’
‘There can only be two reasons you’re here, then.’
‘Try me.’
‘Kate Cormack?’
‘Yowza. And the other?’
‘Joey Rork?’
‘Strike two, Mr Troy. Now, are we going to stand on your doorstep all night or do youfeel like offering me a glass of whatever it is you’re drinking and giving me a few minutes of your time?’
‘Do come in,’ said Troy. ‘I was wondering why no one had turned up to claim the body.’
Goldblatt followed Troy into the house, accepted a glass of claret. Troy watched the hostility begin to melt in him.
‘Y’ know, there are plenty of guys would’ve cold-cocked you for that wisecrack about brushes.’
‘Who said it was a joke?’
Goldblatt’s face split into an amiable grin. He swigged at his wine, smacked his lips, pronounced it ‘great’, and settled himself on the sofa.
‘Let’s get serious,’ he said, still smiling.
Troy pulled out a chair from the dining-table and sat down to face him. Goldblatt flipped open his case and pulled out a folded copy of the Sunday Post.
‘A friend at our embassy read this over the phone to me. I was on a plane three hours later. It mentions two murders. And a possible third. I get to thinking Joey was one of those. Am I right?’
Troy nodded.
‘And these Ryan brothers. They’re related to the Danny Ryan Joey reckoned Mrs Cormack is boffing?’
Troy nodded.
‘And the two are connected. These hoodlums taking over is somehow . . .’ Goldblatt’s hand circled in the air conveying his disbelief better than his words ‘. . . connected to Joey’s investigation and to Mrs Cormack’s, ah . . .’ the hands waved again, this time in imprecision ‘. . . affair?’
‘No,’ said Troy. ‘I think that’s a very unfortunate coincidence. Joey got it into his head that if the brothers were bent so was Danny. And that compromised Kate. I couldn’t get him to see that there was no connection.’
‘And this article. I assume you’ve read it. This article asserts that you have these Ryans in the frame, they’re suspects, but suspects you cannot touch. You guys used to be the premier detective agency in the world.
When I was a boy you guys were the stuff of legend. I grew up reading Sherlock Holmes. Now you can’t catch a couple of hoodlums? So the question is, what the hell is going on at Scotland Yard?’
‘First, your memory deceives you. In Sherlock Holmes we were the bumbling idiots to his smartarse private detective. Second, we are investigating Joey’s murder. I know they did it. I will catch them. You need have no worries about Scotland Yard.’
Goldblatt slapped the paper down on the coffee table. The editorial face-up.
Before he could speak Troy said, ‘Look at the signature, Mr Goldblatt.’
Goldblatt turned the paper, fumbled in his inside pocket and pulled out reading glasses. ‘Alexei Troy. A relative?’
‘My father. He died fifteen years ago.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘I wrote that article, Mr Goldblatt.’
‘I still don’t get it.’
‘Then I can’t make it clearer.’
‘Try me.’
‘No. You’ve had your say. It’s my turn. Who sent you? The Deeks?’
‘I’m chairman of the Deeks. I have responsibilities.’
‘To get Calvin elected.’
‘I was thinking more of the responsibilities I have to Joey’s family.’
This was not a turn Troy had anticipated. Rork just didn’t look married. He’d given no thought to the prospect that he might be. ‘Joey was married?’
‘Twice. And divorced twice. A kid from each marriage. Joe junior just graduated from Columbia. Billy’s still in high school. Wants to be a cop like his old man.’
‘So you’re taking the body?’
‘I guess I am. I have a lot of explaining to do back home.’
‘And you’ll see to the needs of his family?’
‘That’s under discussion.’
‘Mr Goldblatt, I will look after the dead. I’ll give Joey justice. He was a better detective than I thought. I misjudged him. But if he’d not been good at his job he’d never have got so close and he might still be alive. I’ll look after the dead. However much money you have raised to buy the next election for Senator Cormack, I suggest you set some aside for Joey Rork’s children. Do we have a deal?’
Goldblatt gave the matter a moment’s thought. ‘We do. But there’s one thing more you could do for me.’
Troy was suspicious of this and said nothing.
‘Mr Troy, you could send Kate Cormack home.’
Still Troy said nothing.
‘I read all Joey’s reports. I know about you and Mrs Cormack. I have no problem with it. The Deeks have no problem with it. America will have no problem with it. It seems to me that you have enough discretion to see that America will have no problem with it. But you’ve known her a long time. Could be she’ll listen to you. Mr Troy, please send her home before you wrap this case, before it becomes so deep she’s mired in it. I’m not thinking of the presidency, I’m not thinking of the election, I’m not even thinking of Calvin. I’m thinking of her kids. I’m thinking of her. You’re worried about Joey Rork’s kids. That’s good. We both should be. But we should both be worried about the Cormack kids too. Please send her home.’
It was a moving little speech. Enough to earn Goldblatt the respect of a man who, until now, had been quite willing to despise him simply because of his occupation. Troy wished he could respond in spirit, but the truth got in the way.
‘Mr Goldblatt, Kate Cormack doesn’t listen to anybody.’
Three days later Onions appeared in Troy’s office first thing in the morning. Fine, thought Troy. If he feels he has to check up on me. Fine.
‘Things have cooled off a bit,’ he said, lighting up a Woodbine and perching next to the gas fire as though it were mid-December and not the hottest summer for umpteen years.
‘Cooled off ’ meant he wasn’t getting the outraged phonecalls. Troy decided to tell him the truth. Hot or cool.
‘The Ryans are suing the Sunday Post.’
‘Jesus Christ.’ Onions inhaled and stared after the ash he had flicked into the hearth. ‘What is the world coming to?’
One day, maybe, Troy would tell him.
Half an hour later, Troy and Mary McDiarmuid gathered to hear Eddie Clark report on two days’ foot-slogging around Stepney.
‘First off, sir, he doesn’t know you’re on to him. He may hate the fact that the Yard brought Mr Godbehere in over his head, but he seems to think it’s the shit end of an ordinary stick. He’s showed no suspicion and no caution. I rather think I could have dressed up as a chicken and followed him. He just doesn’t pay attention. Not that he doesn’t show basic caution. He does. And that brings me to the first point. He leaves the office, and he leaves his flat in Stratford, to use public phone-boxes. He doesn’t want to be overheard and he doesn’t want to be traced. But it’s a routine. He does it on the assumption that no one would ever follow. It’s habit and he’s lazy about it. He favours two boxes. One in the Whitechapel Road, by the Underground station, and a second in Stratford Broadway. I don’t know who he calls. But he’s used both on each of the last two days. It would be easy to tap them.’
Troy said, ‘Let’s take who he’s calling as read. We won’t get the tap, so I’m not going to bother asking for it.’
‘On Wednesday he visited the Stratford branch of the Westminster Bank. I had Internal Records check up on how his pay cheques are cashed. They always clear through the Westminster. So far, so good. But yesterday, he nipped out just before closing time to call in at the Islington branch of the District. He was just cashing a cheque. He came straight out still counting his money and got back into his car. Assuming he was going back to the nick, I opted to go into the bank rather than follow him. They were iffy but I flashed me warrant card and the manager gave in. The account is in his real name. No disguises. Except that he never told them he was a copper. They had him down as something in the rag trade – a furrier. He opened it three years ago. March of ’56. I checked that against his personnel file. It was eight weeks after he was transferred from Leytonstone. He has £112 in a current account and £3,285 and a few shillings in a deposit. What you’d call a nice little earner. And in case the airy heights of top brass have given you any illusions, he’s a sergeant, I’m a sergeant. It’s more than three times what I earn in a year. In contrast the current account at the Westminster has fifty-eight quid in it. ’Bout what I’ve got in mine, I should think.’
Mary McDiarmuid said, ‘We’ve got him.’
‘Not so fast,’ said Troy. ‘We don’t know whether he has a dear old granny who’s making over a fortune to him in small chunks. We don’t know whether he plays the horses.’
‘He does play the horses, as it happens. I found a betting slip in his coat pocket. Lovely Lady in the 2.30 at Redcar yesterday. Came in last. I had two bob each way on Ramona. Came in second. It pays to study a bit of form. I wouldn’t have backed Lovely Lady if all the other horses had had only three legs. So, I think we can safely say he’s not making a killing at the bookie’s. Which,’ said Eddie, ‘brings me to his assets. He’s single. No girlfriend that I’ve spotted, but there’s the weekend to come. The flat is rented. One bedroom, one living, kitchen and bath. Perfectly affordable on a sergeant’s pay. I slipped the lock while he was out. Nothing you wouldn’t expect in the home of a bloke with no kids. Radiogram and a fridge. And while plenty of people have neither I’d say both were affordable on what he earns. The car’s a Ford Zodiac. Personally I’ve always thought it a wide-boy’s car. A monster with bench seats. You know what that means, don’t you sir? It’s a bit flash, but then that’s what young Robertson called him, as I recall. A bit flash. Mazzer’s car has a sticker in the rear window with the supplier’s address on it. I went round there. He traded in his old one, and bought the new one on the hire purchase. Nothing odd about that. Affordable. Again. So I started to think, what’s the point in being on the take and having three grand in the bank if you can’t spend it? So when he hung up his jacket for a caff lunch yesterday, I hung up mine too, and I got a close look at his. That’s when I found the betting slip. The suit was a nice bit of clobber with a Carnaby Street label inside. I went round to the tailor. He has an account. Not exactly Savile Row, but none of your fifty-bob tailors. They’re discrete suits but they’re classy. They don’t look like Burton’s and I bet they don’t feel like them. And on a sergeant’s pay I couldn’t afford one. The tailor says he’s made four a year for him since 1956.’
Troy did not know how many suits he owned. But he rather thought the average Englishman owned one and one only. And since he never wanted to dry-clean a suit in the first place, owning only the one suit was not a problem for the average Englishman. Twelve suits was preposterous.
‘All in all I begin to think that “flash” was more precise than we thought. It wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill insult. It conveys what the coppers he works with have noticed about him, but haven’t quite registered. If you see what I mean. I think he’s too smart to spend conspicuously. In fact, I think he’s saving it all up for the day when he’s no longer a copper. In the meantime, he’s got the one weakness. And if no one has looked at the cut of his suit and the quality of his cloth, and the frequency with which it changes, then it could be he handles it rather well.’
Troy said, ‘The second bank account is stupid. If it didn’t attract our attention, there’s still the Inland Revenue. It would have been smarter to stuff it under the mattress.’
‘There was nothing under the mattress. I looked. Nor in the top of cistern in the lavvy. I didn’t have time to prise the gas fire off and look up the chimney. But I could go back with a spanner.’
Mary McDiarmuid ignored this and said, ‘What Edwin’s come up with is enough for a10 to open an internal investigation, surely?’
‘Itis. But I don’t want a 10 anywhere near it. I just want to be sure.’
‘I thought you were sure?’
‘I am sure. I just want to be sure sure. Certain.’
‘But he’s the Ryans’ man?’
‘I’ve acted on that notion all along.’
Mary McDiarmuid said, ‘Do you not think, boss, that the Ryans moved pretty damn quick to get someone on the inside so soon?’
‘Not a bad point, sir,’ Eddie chipped in. ‘Mazzer’s had that second bank account for years. For all we know he’s working for somebody else not the Ryans.’
Troy felt stupid. He’d walked up to the obvious, circled it and missed it.
‘Mary, get the car brought round. We have a call to make.’
Once more Mary McDiarmuid drove Troy out to Hampstead Garden Suburb. A tatty grey Trojan van was parked outside Alice Marx’s house; the side gate was propped open. A large black man was pushing a wheelbarrow full of rich black topsoil towards the house and a second pushed a barrowload of horse dung. Troy looked down the side of the house to the back garden. Alice had clearly discovered something the East End could not offer. A hundred-foot back garden and the joys of gardening. He followed the second man. At the back of the house Alice stood chatting to the first, an unlit cigarette in her right hand, gesturing towards the flower-beds. As the second man approached she noticed Troy and Troy got a clear look at her. She was neither dressed nor made-up for gardening, the clothes too neat and too new, the face too bold – not that Troy could think of a shade of lipstick that went with hollyhocks, hostas and horse-muck.
‘Forgotten how to use the phone?’ Alice snapped at him.
‘This won’t take more than a couple of minutes.’
‘You’ve called at a really naff time.’
‘OK. One minute.’
Ally held out the cigarette to the first man. Around his waist he wore a workman’s leather belt, all pouches and pockets, secateurs, knives, a trowel, a short-handled fork, all the handy tools of a handyman.
‘Match me, Sidney,’ she said, and Sidney pulled a cigarette lighter from one of the pouches and held the flame to the tobacco. He somehow contrived to make every muscle, every bi-and tricep, ripple along his arm to bulge through the short sleeve of his T-shirt. Ally looked at Troy across the end of her fag, a wicked glint in her flinty eyes. ‘Out front. We’ll talk out front.’
She brushed past Troy, propped herself against the side of the van in a laconic, contrived pose, blew smoke and said, ‘Well?’
‘I have a favour to ask.’
She spluttered over her fag. Troy thought she was choking and soon realised that this was what passed for laughter.
‘What makes you think I’ll do you any favours?’
‘Nothing. Nothing at all. But I have to ask.’
‘Then I’ll surprise you. I owe you one. Ask away.’
‘You owe me?’
‘I got meself a brief. Not one of Alf ’s, one on me own. You were right about mental cruelty. I can divorce the bastard. I am divorcing the bastard. So whatever it is, Troy, spit it out and take yer chances with yer auntie Ally.’
Troy paused to let this sink in, to be certain in his own mind that there was more to this than mockery.
‘I need to know if Alf and Bernie had a bent copper on their payroll.’
Ally inhaled deeply and exhaled at length. ‘Y’ know, that’s an awful lot to ask. If I say yes, then really, when it comes down to it, I’m grassing someone up, aren’t I?’
‘Ally, I don’t even think in those terms. A bent copper is a bent copper.’
‘And to Alf it’s a useful voice on the inside.’
‘You’re through with Alf.’
One last pause, one last billowing cloud of Player’s Full Strength, and she said, ‘Yes. Alf had – or should I say has? – a copper working for him.’
‘Do you know his name?’
‘No. But he shouldn’t be hard to find. Can you imagine Alf or Bernie trusting anyone who wasn’t Jewish? And how many Jewish coppers do you think there are in London? How many Jewish coppers do you think there are in East London? Now – is that it or was there something else? Cos if we’re done I have a nice six-foot shvartzer to do.’
‘Do?’
‘Oh, I mean to have Sidney. Or maybe Jayjay. Or maybe both. Like you said, I’m through with Alf. Do you know I was a virgin when I married him? And I’ve been faithful to the sod all my married life. It’ll be like losing my virginity all over again.’
‘Ally, you’re the most unlikely-looking virgin I’ve ever seen.’
‘And if it weren’t for the fact that neither you nor I are into pervy peekaboos I’d say, “Just watch me, Troy, just fuckin’ watch me.” ’
She dropped the cigarette, ground it into the paving with the toe of her golden slingback shoe – the perfect footwear for gardening and seduction – and stepped past Troy with a final ‘And next time, phone first!’
When Mary McDiarmuid rounded the corner, he slipped in beside her.
‘Do you know now?’ she said.
‘Yes. Mazzer worked for Alf Marx. The Ryans took him over. Money, threats, it doesn’t matter which. They turned him and then he fingered Alf ’s lieutenant Bernie Champion for them. We should have spotted this ages ago. Bernie would never have let himself be taken. Someone had to set him up. It was Mazzer. I’d put money on it.’
‘Do we pull him?’
‘Not yet. I need Mr Mazzer where he is.’
‘Where to, then? The Yard or home?’
‘Neither. Take me to Hampstead. I think it’s time I had a bit of a chat with my brother.’
Rod opened the door with ‘Decided to knock this time, have you?’
And Troy replied, ‘I’m here on the same subject. If you want this conversation on the doorstep, that’s fine by me.’
Rod swung the door wide and stomped off, as much as a man in carpet slippers can stomp – all the way to the back of the house, into their father’s old study, where he had the desk covered with a scattering of parliamentary papers. It was the summer recess. This was Rod being diligent but wearing mufti – the baggy trousers were corduroy, the shirt was an old one destined for his wife’s duster bag, frayed at the cuffs and collar, and, as ever, the socks did not match. One black, one red.
‘Will this be quick, Freddie? As you can see I’m up to my neck.’
Troy took the aerogramme from his inside pocket, shoved it at Rod and sat down to wait. Rod put on his reading-glasses, read the first few lines standing, then, without looking, shoved a mess of papers aside, made room on his desk, sat and read the rest with his head down.
Troy stared past him, out into the garden. In his youth there had been a quince against the back wall. It wasn’t there now; perhaps it had died. Perhaps his sister-in-law, Cid, had ripped it out. It was hers to rip, and she had none of the excessive sense of conserving the past merely because it was past that infected both Troy and Rod, that led to the old man’s fountain pen still being parked on the edge of the desk, next to the inkwell, where he’d left it one day in 1943.
On cue, the thought summoned the woman, and his sister-in-law came in, saying, ‘I thought I heard your voice. Are you staying for lunch?’
‘No, he can’t stay, Cid. He’s busy,’ said Rod, without looking up.
‘Are you?’ she said to Troy.
Troy said nothing.
She turned to Rod, said, ‘You can be so childish sometimes.’
And left.
When he’d finished, Rod laid the letter flat, walked to the window, in a move he had surely blocked out in his mind, took off his reading-glasses, polished them on his hanky, gazed a minute at the brick wall where the quince used to be, thought the same thought Troy had thought, and said over his shoulder, ‘What is it you expect me to say? That I didn’t know? That Spoon has made a fool of all of us? That Kate Cormack is making a fool of you?’
Troy ignored the last remark. ‘No. Nothing of the sort. If you tell me you didn’t know I won’t believe you. Of course you knew, you’re not in the least bit surprised.’
Rod faced him now, the ham actor advancing upstage. ‘Freddie, the only surprising thing is that you know.’
‘Fine – but I do have a question. Knowing what you know, why do you accept it? What value can there be in having a spook you know about?’
Rod blinked rapidly and rubbed at one eye with his fist. ‘Are we talking in confidence?’
‘I’m on duty, Rod.’
‘You have a professional interest in Spoon?’
‘You know damn well I have. I told you that the last time we spoke.’
‘And you still expect a straight answer?’
‘Rod, as you are ever reminding me, I’m the devious one, not you.’
It was too easy a reassurance – it wasn’t a reassurance at all: it was a back-handed flattery, but when Rod took his seat again and stuck his glasses into his breast pocket, Troy knew he was going to tell him anyway.
‘OK. It wouldn’t be all that hard to figure out, after all. And if the penny drops you’ll come crowing to me as though you’d just caught Jack the Ripper. But what I have to say will be of no professional interest to you whatsoever. What is worth knowing you already know. Spoon works for the CIA. I’ve known for about eighteen months. And I’ve no intention of telling you how I found out, so don’t ask.’
‘Who else knows?’
‘There’s three of us now. You, me and Hugh Gaitskell. One too many, but there you are.’
‘And Hugh is tolerating a spy in his shadow cabinet. I say again, why?’
‘Freddie, what happened last winter?’
‘It snowed. Buddy Holly died. Worse still, he got knocked off the number-one spot by Russ Conway, and I was tempted to smash the wireless.’
Rod sighed. ‘On the geopolitical front.’
Troy had to think about this. The boot was on the other foot. This was usually the sort of thing he put to Rod. Rod was painfully spelling out to him something he hadn’t guessed. It was an oddly strange feeling. The Prime Minister had been to Russia, wearing a silly hat and plus-fours, the French had gone mad and elected General de Gaulle president . . . and an odd-looking bloke with a bushy beard had . . .
‘Cuba?’
‘Give the boy a coconut. Yes, Freddie, Cuba. Cuba, Fidel Castro and a left-wing revolution on the American doorstep.’
‘I think you’ll find the word is backyard, rather than doorstep. And do we know Castro is left-wing? I would have said that’s a hard one to call. It’s a bit early for the Americans to be screaming Commie. He’s nationalised a few things, he’s stopped them treating Cuba like the world’s biggest corporate brothel. I have difficulty assigning a political label to that. It’s nationalism, and it’s moral. Is it really Communist?’
‘I doubt that Ike draws the fine distinctions you do. But what I do know is that as much as anyone as cool as Ike – and I’ve known him nearly twenty years – as much as anyone as cool as Ike can be paranoid, he is paranoid about Cuba and Commies in his own backyard. The damage done to the Americans’ confidence in us by the likes of Klaus Fuchs, Burgess, Maclean – all those sort of chaps – is all but unimaginable. Try to see a value in Spoon. Spoon is the Americans’ man in our midst. We are a left-wing party about to take power, about to take control of the nation that up to now has been their staunchest ally. They are going to need some reassurance.’
‘Why? Does Ike suffer from the delusion that Fuchs or Burgess or Maclean were supporters of the Labour Party? The party of the average working bloke? That the average working bloke is a KGB spy? Rod, I knew Guy Burgess. Working bloke he was not. I doubt he ever did a day’s work in his life.’
‘The English class system will mean fuck all to Ike. I would not even begin to explain to him why all our spies are toffs. The fact that Guy Burgess was not born to the cloth cap and the brown boots will be too subtle for any American. Crude as it is, it remains, and please don’t argue the toss, that we are the party of the Left and hence suspect. Every Labour government there’s ever been has been suspect – the Red is always under the bed. There will always be people willing to believe we are hand in glove with the Soviet Union, always people willing to believe stuff like the Zinoviev letter. The first whiff of nationalisation and there are people in Washington who’ll be pointing the finger at us and screaming Commie. Dick Nixon, to name but one, has built a career on Commie-baiting. Spoon and Nixon, as your source makes perfectly clear, are like that.’ Rod held up the crossed fingers of his right hand.
‘So Spoon is what? Your feed back to Washington?’
‘Better than that – a direct conduit back to the Americans, and via Nixon to the heartland of their paranoia. He’ll be privy to what goes on, he can rat on us all he likes. In fact we’ll be mightily pissed off if he doesn’t, because he’ll never learn anything about us that cannot be favourably received in Washington. Spoon will know what we want him to know. No more, no less. Of course, we can’t stop him speculating . . . but we’ll see he gets all the information he needs. And if by some twisted logic the American people see fit to elect Nixon president next year . . .’
Rod waved a hand in the air, wafting away the sentence into the obvious. Troy thought about it. It was worth a little thought. It was little short of brilliant. ‘You didn’t think this up.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘It’s too clever by half.’
‘I shall ignore the insult – but basically you’re right. Hugh came up with this one.’
Troy pondered ‘this one’. Better than brilliant, it was wonderfully devious. So much so he wished he’d thought of it himself.
‘You’re overlooking one thing.’
‘Which is?’
‘Spoon is still bent. Nothing to do with being a spook. Nothing to do with all those dodgy deals you’re endorsing in the East End. The man is bent per se.’
‘Bent how?’
‘Can’t tell you that.’
Rod folded the aerogramme and handed it back to Troy. ‘Thank you, Freddie. This has, as ever, been a one-sided exchange. But before I tell you to fuck off, did nothing else about this letter strike you?’
‘Such as?’
‘The remarkable similarity between the account of Spoon’s early life and that of our father.’
‘Rod, I find that an odious comparison.’
‘It’s there in black and white. Read it again.’
Troy put the letter back in his pocket unread.
‘What are you going to do now? About Spoon, I mean.’
‘Nothing until I have evidence.’
‘And if you find evidence?’
‘I’ll return the favour. You’ll be the first to know. But I’ll tell you now. Don’t bank on having him as your tame songbird in the next cabinet.’
‘A hint, Freddie, just a hint, a bit of a quid pro quo?’
‘No, Rod. No hints. I’ll either get the evidence or I won’t.’
Back in the Bentley, heading south down Haverstock Hill, Mary McDiarmuid said, ‘Home?’
Troy said, ‘Stepney.’ Then, ‘The butcher’s bodies.’
‘Yes, boss?’
‘Let’s try a new approach. Let’s come at it backwards.’
‘Eh?’
‘Let’s presume an identity and try to prove it.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Young and male we know, sexually assaulted we know – let’s drop the notion of the sex as part of the subsequent violence, let’s draw a line between the two acts, buggery and murder, and presume no direct connection between the two and hence let us presume consent to the sexual act and let us sidestep the conclusion that the killer was also the bugger. Let’s presume three things, working class, northern accent . . . and homosexual.’
‘Well, that would whittle down the list. Could I ask why those three criteria?’
‘Ted Spoon’s bent. The marriage is a fig-leaf. His penchant is for rough trade – specifically for young northern lads. Let’s proceed on the assumption that whatever he is doing for the Ryans by way of business deals, they are doing something simpler, far older and far simpler, for him.’
‘Procuring?’
‘I can’t think what else to call it. Procuring – then murder.’
‘Do you think Spoon knows these boys end up murdered?’
‘I’m damn sure he doesn’t. But I want to be there when he finds out.’
‘But . . . why kill them?’
‘For the same reason they killed Brock. To show us they can. It was something Jack said when we found the second body. “They’re taking the piss,” he said. They’d tried to hide the first. They made no attempt with the second. They used it to hold two fingers up to us. It was a message and it said, “Can’t catch me.” And it said it to the Metropolitan Police force. Took me a while to work that one out. But it took them a while too. Otherwise they’d have flaunted the first corpse.’
‘Aha.’
‘Why do I find no element of surprise in your “aha”?’
Mary McDiarmuid said nothing, a concentrated pause.
‘Well?’
‘I read the file on one of your old cases.’
‘Which old case.’
‘The Diana Brack murders.’
It had been an age since anyone had uttered that name to Troy.
‘And?’
‘Well, there are similarities.’
‘Similarities?’
‘Do you not think they’re copying the crime?’
‘Copying?’
‘In 1944 Diana Brack and her accomplice cut up a corpse and tried to dispose of it.’
‘I know.’
‘A dog found one arm.’
‘The left, as it happens. Do try to be precise.’
Mary McDiarmuid ignored this. ‘You found the rest . . .’
‘I know that too.’
‘. . . with the help of a gang of kids, two of whom, according to Constable Robertson, were the Ryan twins. You heard him – you were a hero to that bunch. I say they’re cutting up corpses in imitation – of a bizarre kind.’
She had her eyes on the road, but they flickered to look at him as he studied her words in silence for the best part of a mile.
‘When did you figure this out?’
‘I’ve been thinking about it for a while.’
‘And when were you going to tell me?’
‘I thought I just did. But there’s more. I heard you asking Edwin why you’d not been shown something on Joey Rork this morning. The airmail letter? Am I right?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s not the only thing Mr Wildeve didn’t tell you. The prick in the post . . .’
‘No, he told me about that.’
‘What he didn’t tell you is that it wasn’t addressed to him – it was addressed to you.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘They’re not just taking the piss or copying an old crime. They’re not holding up two fingers to the whole of the Metropolitan Police force. It’s you. They’re aiming the lot straight at you.’
For a while they drove in silence, this time of Mary McDiarmuid’s making. Crossing Spitalfields, Troy could all but hear the cogs in her mind crunching over. ‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘We’re proceeding on the assumption that the Ryans are responsible for Mr Brocklehurst, those two young men. Joey Rork and . . . Bernie Champion?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why haven’t we found Bernie Champion? We’ve found everybody else. Why aren’t they flaunting that?’
‘Because they need the illusion that he’s still alive to put the screws on his wife and Ally Marx.’
‘So they’ve got Bernie very well stashed. Somewhere we wouldn’t think of looking?’
Not a bad point, thought Troy. Worth some thought. He’d think about it.
As Troy was coming into Leman Street police station a man in his early thirties was coming out. He passed Troy without a word, and stood with his back to him, fiddling with the keys to his two-tone – did they come any other way? – Ford Zodiac parked at the kerb. It was, thought Troy, a little surprising that Mr Mazzer did not know him by sight, but just as surprising that he should be able to spot Mazzer merely by Swift Eddie’s description of his suit and his manner. He reminded Troy of a small boy jingling the coins in his pocket. Not that Mazzer was doing any such thing, but something about him amounted to the same effect: a combination of caution and boastfulness. He wasn’t saying ‘Look what I’ve got,’ but he was letting you know it all the same. Eddie was right – in his own words, ‘The suit set him back a bob or two, none of your fifty-shilling tailors’ – but what he hadn’t mentioned was the grooming. Al Mazzer hadn’t got that haircut down the Mile End Road from Shrimp Robertson’s father, or any ex-army barber whose talents extended to short-back-and-sides and no further. Troy could not think from where he got the phrase, but it was appropriate. Mr Mazzer looked like the sort of bloke who would pay for a shoeshine and tip well in restaurants – and these days so few would do either.
Mazzer wound down the window, placed a hand on the door, thinking. Troy could see the manicure now – no bitten or nicotined fingernails. Perhaps that was the secret of wealth you could never flaunt: you spent it on the small things of life, the little things that made all the difference but would be hardly noticeable. Then Mazzer turned the engine over and looked in the rear-view mirror. He must have caught sight of Troy’s Bentley parked twenty or so feet behind him. He looked at Troy now, and for the first time he seemed to recognise him. Troy turned and walked into the police station.
‘You just missed Mazzer,’ Godbehere said.
‘No,’ said Troy. ‘I don’t think I did.’
They compared notes. Godbehere had compiled a list of all known ‘Ryan associates’ – a euphemism for a gang.
‘George Bonham was great,’ Godbehere said. ‘Makes you wonder why we retire people at that age. And that MP you put me on to, Les Gidney. He introduced me to half a dozen local councillors, including two blokes off the planning committee. I’ve a good idea of what the Ryans own, and what they paid for it. They’ve been spending like two Irish sailors on shore leave. They have property all over the manor, but better still they’ve been buying up most of Watney Market. The market itself and the side-streets belong mainly to two insurance companies who’ve owned them since about 1890. The Essex and Herts Assurance and the London-Liverpool Commercial. They’ve let the houses rot, basically. Done the minimum maintenance to comply with the law, and God knows that isn’t much, and collected minimum rent. Even with the housing shortage they’ve proved a poor investment, and the Ryans are buying one or two a week for a matter of a few hundred apiece. Last month they picked up the whole of Cridlan Street for twelve thousand pounds.’
‘What? All of it?’
‘All twenty-three remaining houses. The whole damn lot. Mind, Cridlan Street didn’t belong to either of those insurance companies. The owners put it up for auction.’
‘And they were?’
‘Would you believe the Church of England?’
Troy had no difficulty believing this.
Godbehere continued, ‘Gidney thinks they’re playing a waiting game, waiting for a compulsory purchase order. The council buys the houses at a whacking great profit – and all without the bother of having to evict tenants.’
‘It’s better than that. They get permission to develop the site, become part of a consortium to rebuild, and the consortium pays the Ryans a huge kickback. And the government tops it all with a fat handout under the name of urban renewal and a national housing programme.’
‘Hell’s bells,’ said Godbehere. ‘It’s the perfect con. They’ll be rich twice over. But that brings me to the bad news. You’ll need more resources than I’ve got to find out where they keep their money. I’ve tracked down a few bank accounts – after all, they need some to look legit. But where the money from the rackets gets laundered before it’s fed back to something legit . . . I don’t know.’
‘That’s OK. I’m concentrating more on where they get it than where it goes. Now,’ said Troy, ‘the gang.’
Godbehere handed Troy a badly typed sheet of names. Most of them meant nothing to Troy. If this was East End villainy it was a generation and more that had grown up since Troy walked the beat. But half a dozen names looked familiar.
‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ Troy asked.
‘I am, sir. A lot of Jewish names.’
‘The remnants of Alf Marx’s gang, getting by the only way they know. Serving their new masters.’
Troy pulled out his list.
‘I got this from John Brocklehurst’s files. A good portion of Alf ’s gang went down with him. I crossed those names out. I’d guess there were a dozen or so left on the street when he went down. The Ryans seem to have recruited seven, if your narks have it right.’
Godbehere took the list and set them side by side on the desk.
‘Stan Cohen.’
‘Not one I ever met,’ said Troy.
‘Arthur Cantor.’
‘In his day one of the best petermen in London. Lately I think he’s done not much more than run errands for Alf and Bernie Champion.’
‘Saggy Stein.’
‘Drove the car on Alf ’s bank jobs. Spent most of the forties in Parkhurst.’
‘LouLevy.’
‘A thug. If Alf wanted legs broken or arms twisted, Lou was the man.’
‘Dave Silver.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘Mal Gelb.’
‘Nor him.’
‘Moses Kettleman.’
‘Ah . . . Mott Kettle. Petty thief, pickpocket, bookie’s runner and police informer. My first collar in 1936. I caught Mott brazenly stealing women’s underwear from a stall in Whitechapel market. He got three months. Then in 1938 I caught him for receiving and the judge put him away for two years. By the time he got out the war was on, he was nearly forty, the army wouldn’t call him up at that age and he didn’t volunteer. He did what a lot of skivers did – he worked the black market, worked it stupidly and poorly and took getting nicked as an occupational hazard. It’s not that Mott was at the back of the queue when God gave out brains, he was probably just looking the other way.’
‘You think he’s the weak link?’
‘I think they’re all the weak link. Pull the lot.’
This, clearly, was close to the last thing Godbehere had expected to hear Troy say. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, sir, why?’
‘Because the Ryans will expect it. If we’ve done this properly, they now know I’m here. They know you’ve been building up a file and they’ll expect action. Mr Mazzer will surely have told them that.’
‘But I’ve shut Mazzer out – just like you told me to do.’
‘Quite. But he’d be a very poor excuse for a detective if he hasn’t been able to come up with a version of what’s happening. Fragmented, maybe, with a lot of guesswork filling in. Nothing like being cut out to make a copper nosy, after all. And if he hasn’t tipped the Ryans off then I’ve overestimated them all.’
Godbehere nodded as though finally seeing the whole picture for the first time. ‘You do realise they’ll turn up with their briefs?’
‘Some will, some won’t. And if the Ryans feel like spending money on a lawyer for the likes of Mott Kettle, then I’ll eat my hat. Pull them in, and ask them about their whereabouts on the nights Joey Rork and Glenda Felucci died. Ask them till they curl at the edges with boredom. And let’s put on a show. Lots of police cars, lots of uniforms, a few sirens. Let’s make ourselves visible.’
‘Do you think they’ll know anything?’
‘No. In fact, I’m damn certain they won’t. As I said, Mr Godbehere, we’re putting on a show.’
Mott reminded Troy of the first time he had ever met Fish Wally. The sheer intensity of neglect and plain grubbiness. Wally had improved beyond recognition. All he’d required was an income remotely commensurate with his taste. Mott had got worse. He’d greeted Troy with ‘How long is it now, Mr Troy?’
And Troy rather thought it had been seven or eight years since he’d last encountered Mott. Now he was fifty-six or -seven. Thin, in that undernourished way that still characterised Wally and which Troy was fairly certain he’d never shake off, but thinner than thin – he was scrawny. A scrawniness emphasised by the fact that his suits always seemed to be hand-me-downs. This particular hand-me-down had been made for a man much stouter than Mott and hung on him with all the elegance of a barrage balloon snagged on a telegraph-pole. He looked tubercular. Grey of skin, red of eye and sporting a manicure that would have had Mazzer throwing up in the gutter. Buckets of lemon juice, mountains of pumice would never shift the nicotine from his fingers. It had gone way beyond the tips. It crept down his fingers to the second joint, looking like blackleg on a potato haulm. The suit was a wartime relic, the wide-trousered, tight-waited fashion of the early forties, nipped at the back of the jacket with a strap – tastelessly brown, faintly enlivened by a pencil-line red stripe, worn shiny at the knees and elbows, and piss-rotten at the crotch.
He greeted Troy like a long-lost friend, rising from his chair, one hand clutching a cigarette, one outstretched as though he would shake hands given half a chance. Not knowing why he had been pulled, the sight of a man who had put him away twice was close to familiarity.
‘As I live and breathe – Mr Troy. How long’s it been now, Mr Troy?’
‘Sit down, Mott.’
‘What is it – fifteen years? Twenty? I’ve followed yer career, y’ know. Local boy made good an’ all that. You’ve done really well for yerself. I said that the first time you nicked me. I said, “That young copper’s going to go far.” S’welp me I did. I said to the lads, “That young man’ll be in a top job one day.” A top job. I did. Honest I did. A top job. And now . . . ’ere you are. A Scotland Yard detective an’ all. I said you’d go far. I did. I did. A top job.’
It seemed to Troy that Mott would go on all night like this. He held up a hand as though he were on point duty in traffic. Anything to stop the babble of nonsense. ‘You’ve not brought your brief. You’re entitled to have a solicitor present.’
‘Mr Troy, I ain’t done nuffink. What would I want with a lawyer?’ The mouth split into a broad smile, a cave of stained teeth. The hands spread in a disarming gesture, fag ash scattering across the table. ‘Besides, you ain’t cautioned me yet.’ Mott smiled the wider. One point scored in the midst of his babble.
‘Anything you say . . . and blah-de-blah . . . Let’s take the caution as read, shall we?’
‘Why are you cautioning me? I ain’t done nuffink.’
‘Where were you on the night of July the seventeenth?’
Mott still smiled. ‘Blowed if I know.’
‘Or August the fifth?’
And smiled again. He was enjoying the game. ‘I’d have to ask me social seccerterry.’
‘How long have you been working for the Ryans?’
The smile vanished. Mott resorted to a fit of coughing to disguise the reality of his reaction. The name ‘Ryan’ alone might have been enough to turn that sallow hide pale.
Troy waited for him to finish hoiking, straighten up and put another cigarette to his lips.
‘Never ’eard of ’em.’
The match shook in his hand. Troy gripped Mott’s hand in his and guided the flame to the tip, squeezing hard as he did so. Mott twisted his head to get closer to the flame, accepting pain as a fair price for his shot of nicotine.
‘I’m sorry, Mott. I must be going deaf. I thought you just said you’d never heard of them.’ Troy let him go.
One swift, greedy drag, and another fit of coughing. ‘Well. I’ve ’eard of ’em. O’ course I ’ave. Everybody’s ’eard of ’em. But that’s it. I don’t know nuffink. I ain’t done nuffink. I just . . . ’eard of ’em. That’s all.’
‘New kids on the block, eh?’
‘Yeah . . . that’s it . . . new kids.’
‘New kids who bumped off John Brocklehurst, Joey Rork and Glenda Felucci, and made Bernie Champion vanish into thin air.’
Mott inhaled deeply and blew out a long cloud of smoke. ‘We was all shocked by what happened to Mr Brocklehurst. It weren’t right. And poor Glenda. I knew ’er when she was a little girl. That weren’t right neither. I never ’eard of that other bloke. But Bernie . . . Bernie’s just taking a break.’
‘Bernie’s dead, Mott.’
‘No . . . ’e ain’t, Mr Troy. ’E’ll be back any day now. I reckon ’e’s away on a spot of business. ’E’ll be back any day now, you mark my words.’
‘Bernie was set up by a member of your team, set up and bumped off by the Ryans. The Ryans then came to you lot, the dregs at the bottom of Alf and Bernie’s pickle barrel, and told you they were taking over. You’ve spent the summer working for the new kids, only they’re not kids. Now – where were you the night Bernie vanished?’
‘It was a Thursday the last time I saw Bernie. An’ I always play snooker on Thursdays.’
‘And you’ve witnesses to this?’
‘Every Thursday since 1945. Sid Stott’s pool room by Stepney Green station. Ask anybody.’
‘So who was with Bernie that night? Who drove for him, who was meant to be guarding him?’
‘I never drove for ’im, Mr Troy. Why would Bernie want me drivin’ for ’im when he had Louand Saggy? Two o’ the best . . .’
The brick dropped so clunkily on to the table that even Mott heard it and stopped.
‘So it was Louand Saggy who set Bernie up?’
‘I don’t know nuffink.’
‘You stood by and let two of your mates sell out the man who’d looked after you since you got out of the nick nearly twenty years ago. You stepped aside and you let a pair of tearaway kids blow him away.’
‘I don’t know nuffink.’
Troy got up to leave, Mott yelling at his back, ‘I don’t know nuffink! What could I know? Bernie ain’t dead, Bernie’ll be back!’
Troy left Mott alone with Shrimp Robertson, and went in search of Godbehere. Godbehere was just emerging from an interview with Lou Levy. ‘He’s the only one who brought his brief. I feel like I’m playing in the yes-no interlude in there. I’ll get gonged off any minute.’
‘I think I know why Loumight be the only one who wanted a brief. He’s probably the one who helped Mazzer set up Bernie for the Ryans.’
‘I don’t think he’ll confess to that in a month of Sundays.’
‘Nor do I. String it out as long as you can – until about half an hour before the pubs close if possible. I want them in a pub tonight, bewailing their lot and shooting their mouths off.’
‘I’ve been with them just over an hour and we’re already at the point where his brief is saying, “My client has already answered that question, Mr Godbehere.” I’m running out of new ways to phrase the same question.’
‘Try for ten o’clock at least – and then turn them loose. Everyone but Mott. Let Mott spend a night in the cells.’
Troy caught the Underground back to Charing Cross and walked along the Embankment to Scotland Yard.
Mary McDiarmuid was still at work in his outer office. A pile of files a foot high on her desk – a dozen or more spread out across the floor, and Mary on her knees hunched over them.
‘I think I’ve got something,’ she said, turning to look wry-necked at Troy.
‘So soon?’
‘Once you lay down criteria, so much else just falls away. Doesn’t make the conclusion the right one, but it does throw up possibilities that fit the initial assumption.’
She was learning fast. That was an Eddie Clark sentence. The precise phrasing of the consummate philosopher con-artist, offering no hostages to logic or fortune. A retreat always open to an implicit ‘I told you so.’ Troy knelt beside her – a movement that would have sent him reeling with giddiness a fortnight ago.
‘There’s two that really stand out. Him . . .’ Mary slapped the flat of her hand on an open file. ‘. . . and him.’
She reached across the floor and pulled a file nearer to them. ‘Naill Devanney. Aged twenty. Been missing since last Christmas. Labourer on a council road crew in Warrington. His mother reported him missing the day after Boxing Day. He has the physique to be either of these. And you’ll see . . .’ She held up the photo to Troy. ‘Quite the pretty boy. I could fancy him m’self.’
‘But,’ said Troy, ‘queer?’
‘Boss, nobody, however worried about their son, is going to walk into a nick anywhere in Britain and say the boy is queer. What Mrs Devanney actually said was that he was always getting picked on at work, and that he’d been beaten up a couple of times outside pubs. I’d put money on Niall being a poof. I’d put money on him knowing he was different, holding back most of his life and only acknowledging it when his mates started calling him a nancy-boy and making his life into hell.’
‘Bad as that, eh?’
‘I’m from Glasgow. Take it from me. Most working-class men feel threatened by queers, or anyone they suspect might be.’
‘And the other.’
‘John Mackie from Skelmersdale.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Lancashire, sort of between Liverpool and Bolton. John was nineteen. Vanished in February. Not a labourer. A clerk at the Co-op accounts department. But he belonged to a gym and went in for bodybuilding. His parents went to the police together after he’d been gone five days. There’s nothing so definite to make me think he was queer, except their reluctance to talk about their son’s character, friends, hobbies – you name it . . . To judge by their answers to the local police they hardly knew the lad. Either they’re not telling what they know or he led a double life. Either way I can feel my thumbs pricking.’
‘Quite,’ said Troy. ‘I think it’s time we called in a favour from Mr Milligan.’
‘Mr Milligan?’
‘He was transferred to Warrington.’
Paddy heard Troy out, offered to call a friend at Skelmersdale and to drive round to the Devanney household in person. But there was a but. ‘Knocking on someone’s door and saying, “That lad you reported missing may well be dead. And, oh, by the way was he a shirt lifter?” isn’t exactly guaranteed to get results. Not on Merseyside anyway.’
‘I’ll leave that to your tact, Paddy.’
‘Give me about an hour,’ he said.
As Troy rung off, Mary McDiarmuid was standing in front of him clutching a note. ‘The strangest character rang up. Sort of bloke who’d use three words where one would do. Name of Fish Wally. Wants to meet you. St Stephen’s, as soon as you can.’
It was warm in the upstairs room at St Stephen’s Tavern. Warm and empty. It was the watering-hole of MPs – this being the summer recess, there was not one to be seen. Just the odd peer and the odder policeman, stranded like crabs in rock-pools at low tide. Empty, and warm enough for Wally to have forsaken his overcoat. But for the Mickey Mouse gloves he looked rather like a barrister, with his black jacket and striped trousers. He sat at a centre table, sipping neat vodka. When he saw Troy enter he raised the glass and indicated more of the same. Troy changed a fiver at the bar and set a glass apiece in front of Wally. He would have liked an ice cube in his, but he did not feel like hearing Wally’s lecture on how to drink vodka.
‘I am sorry to drag you out, but this is as safe as anywhere. I have news, of sorts. I caught up with old Bobby Collington. A day or so after we last met he decided to retire. Something proved too much for the old man. I tracked him out to a seaside boarding-house.’
‘Frinton?’
‘Herne Bay. Where he lives under the tender care of a Mrs Cravat, whilst looking in every estate agent’s for a suitable bungalow. The man is clearly through with London. Indeed, to invoke Dr Johnson, I thought he might be through with life. He was reluctant to see me, but I oiled his wheels. In fact, you owe me for a first-class return fare and a bottle of single malt. But . . . he eased up and he talked. The Ryans came into his office – I do not know precisely when, but it must have been around the time we last met – high on the thrill. Bobby thought they were drunk at first, but it dawned on him that it was the intoxication of action. After all, he and I and you saw so much of that during the war. The garrulousness of it all. The constant, compulsive rehashing of a moment. As potent as any drug, you will agree. They told him how they had, and I quote, “bumped off a copper’s nark”.’
‘They did,’ said Troy. ‘Or, at least, I can see how they might think he was a copper’s nark.’
‘Understandably Bobby panicked. He told them he wanted out and offered to sell them his remaining share of the club for twenty thousand pounds. He took five. Within forty-eight hours he had let his flat in Marylebone, and set off for Kent with a suitcase and a portable gramophone. He says he will never go back to London. Nor, alas, will he ever repeat anything of what he told me. I don’t know what use it would be in court anyway, but I rather think Bobby would die before he’d testify against the Ryans. They have him well and truly scared.’
‘I need a witness, Wally.’
‘Collington is not your man. I begin to wonder who is. This pair seem to scare the living daylights out of everyone they meet. You need a very brave man, a very foolish man . . . or else you should be praying they do something utterly stupid.’
‘I’m working on that,’ said Troy.
He bought Wally another vodka, left two fivers under the glass, saw the gloved hand make them disappear like a music-hall conjuror, and went back to the Yard.
’Nothing doing,’ said Milligan. ‘The couple in Skelmersdale wouldn’t let my mate over the threshold. They slammed the door in his face as soon as he asked the question. I had better luck. I got past the front door – but Devanney practically chucked me out of the house once he realised what I wanted. His wife was more willing. I could see she wanted to talk. But for the old man she might have done. But your guess was right. The rage had motive. Kept banging on about “no son of mine” and all that malarkey. The boy’s a poof all right. In fact, I don’t think he ran away, I rather think the old man threw him out.’
‘Does the old man work?’
‘Foreman in a cable and wire works.’
‘And the wife?’
‘Oh, no. “A man’s not a man who can’t keep his wife” . . .’
‘And all that malarkey. Fine. Go round there in the morning and have another go at her. If I’m not at the Yard I’ll be in Stepney.’
The last call of the day was overdue, and unexpected. It disturbed Troy to think that out of sight was ever out of mind.
‘Where’ve you been?’ Kitty said.
Concern or small-talk? He replayed her voice in his mind’s ear looking for signs. ‘I’m back at work,’ he replied, racking his brains to remember when he had last seen her. ‘And you?’
‘Scotland. London got so damned Singapore, didn’t it? Danny whisked me away to a breezy castle on a Scottish loch for a couple of weeks. You know what a loch is?’
‘A large static body of—’
‘Don’t be so literal. It’s a lazy river. That’s what a loch is, a really lazy river.’
‘So you finally found it?’
‘I wouldn’t say that exactly.’
‘Which one was it?’
‘God knows. Ickle or Muckle. I wouldn’t have a clue. It might even have been the one with the monster in it, for all I know. Just west of Glasgow and east of the sun – and it was bliss. For a while it was bliss.’
‘I’ve been east,’ he said, wondering if she’d take the bait.
‘East,’ she said. ‘East? You mean Stepney?’
‘Yes.’
He counted the beats as she paused.
‘You’re going after Danny’s brothers, aren’t you?’
What did it matter if he told her? As he had said to Godbehere, they knew he was there. He wanted them to know he was there. What did it matter if they found out by a second route, a roundabout route, that he was on to them? If Mary McDiarmuid was right and the Ryans had him in their sights, what did it matter if they knew he had them in his? They would expect nothing else.
‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’
‘No . . . of course not. You’re a copper. It’s just . . . it’s just that it’s got nothing to do with Danny.’
‘I know.’
‘You mean that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Because I’m keeping out of it. I’m not going to get involved and I’m not going to let Danny get involved.’
Insomnia was nagging at him again. That light tearing of the flesh. That random searing of the mind. That tumbling cascade of faces. Foxx as he had last seen her in the midst of her confusion. His sister standing lost and baffled in his room, wondering where her clothes were. The long stare his wife had given him across the room in the Café Royal – the wide-open, nut-brown eyes. Then every image blurred and resolved down to one. Diana Brack, hand outstretched, fingertips touching his, leaving him – all those years ago on the dance-floor of the Berkeley, leaving him. And then, when everything turned to black . . . Kitty’s voice, the cadences in her questions.
Last . . . the repetitious nature of Mary McDiarmuid’s questions. Less now the product of insomnia than the cause. ‘Somewhere we wouldn’t think of looking?’ Somewhere we wouldn’t think of looking? Where would we not . . . ?
Around four a.m. he reached for the telephone and called Bonham. ‘When did Bernie Champion disappear?’
‘Wot?’
‘Bernie Champion. He vanished, what, two months ago?’
Troy could hear Bonham struggling from sleep to waking, but he’d hardly struggle with dates. He’d already reached the age when the most interesting thing in any newspaper was the obituary column.
‘More like three, nearer thirteen weeks.’
‘And when did Edna Stilton die?’
‘Same week.’
‘And the funeral was the week after?’
‘We was there, Freddie. If you can’t remember that—’
‘And the old boy who came hobbling up to us to tell us his wife’s grave had been vandalised?’
‘Arthur. Arthur Foulds.’
‘And have there been other, similar attacks since?’
‘No. I’d’ve heard. After all I go to a soddin’ funeral there at least once a fortnight. Or it seems as though I do.’
‘Alice, it’s Troy.’
‘God almighty, Troy, do you know what time it is?’
‘You did say to phone first.’
‘I know, but not at this bleedin’ time. You’ll wake me shvartzers.’
‘Ally, there’s a car on the way for you.’
‘To take me where?’
‘St George’s churchyard.’
‘What? The one in Shadwell? If you think I’m gettin’ up at five o’clock in the mornin’ to traipse back to the bleedin’ East End you can—’
‘Ally, I could have called you or I could have called Millie Champion.’
‘What have you found?’
‘Nothing yet, but I want you there when I do. You’ll want to be there when I do.’
The coroner was probably no happier about Troy’s morning call than Alice Marx, but he made less fuss. Troy had a police motorcyclist collect the exhumation order, and asked George Bonham to bring a spade and a shovel off his allotment. The only person he didn’t have to knock up was the verger of St George-in-the-East. He wondered about the protocol of telling Arthur Foulds they were about to dig up his wife’s grave, and thought better of it. If he was right, they’d not even hit the lid of her coffin. The exhumation order was a legal cover note for the police arse and nothing more.
He had roused Mott Kettle himself, but it was obvious Mott had not slept, and from the fug that washed over Troy when he opened the cell door it was just as obvious he’d smoked the night away. All he said was, ‘Don’t I get breakfast first?’
‘Only if you’re prepared to lose it later.’
At the graveside they waited. Troy, Godbehere, Bonham, Mazzer, Shrimp Robertson and Mott Kettle. Waited until Troy’s Bentley pulled up at the Cable Street gate, and Ally Marx got out. Headscarf and dark glasses, slacks and a flowing silk coat. Every inch the film star. Except that, Troy was certain, Elizabeth Taylor would not have had the kingsize cigarette hanging off her bottom lip. ‘All you boys waiting for me. I don’t know what to say. But I reckon “Ready when you are” should about fit the bill,’ she said.
They all looked at Bonham. Bonham handed the spade to Mazzer and the shovel to Robertson. Troy hadn’t suggested this, but it was a touch he relished. Let Mr Mazzer be the one to get London clay on his Carnaby Street suit. Old Arthur had restored his wife’s grave. The polyanthi were blossomless now, but stood in ranks like toy soldiers on some miniature Waterloo making up the British square – and not a weed in sight. Whoever had messed with the grave three months ago had left it alone since. Now the police were the vandals. But Troy knew it hadn’t been vandals in the first place.
‘Did it have to be so early?’ Ally whispered to Troy.
‘Any later and we’d have an audience.’
Robertson carefully set Arthur Foulds’s plants to one side and leaned on the shovel while Mazzer dug. It took him less than two minutes to hit something.
‘It’s soft,’ he said.
‘Then go carefully.’
Bernie Champion had always been a dapper man. Not tasteful exactly, but neat. The first thing Troy recognised were the silver buttons on his blazer. The thug whose pose was to look like a retired RAF officer – blazer, grey cavalry twill trousers, brown suede shoes. He never had looked like a thug: he’d looked more like a professional cad who hung around the seaside resorts of the south coast preying on rich, susceptible widows.
Several weeks underground hadn’t done wonders for his appearance. But for the clothes Troy would have been uncertain as to whose rotting remains they had exposed. But Ally Marx knew him. The fag was dropped, the handkerchief withdrawn from a sleeve and pressed first to her mouth and then to her eyes. And Mott Kettle knew. The ashen look on his face was not the general, disturbed face of a man shown a corpse, it was the blood-drained face of a man finally confronting what he had denied for so long.
Troy walked to the edge of the grave, knelt down, scraped a bit more earth off the decaying face, and beckoned Mott closer. ‘Look,’ he said.
‘I don’t need to look no more. I can see from here. I don’t know him. How could anyone know him?’
Alice Marx screamed, ‘It’s Bernie, you fucking idiot! It’s Bernie! Tell him it’s Bernie, Mott, or are you going to be a complete fool all your fucking life?’
Mott muttered, ‘I don’t know him, Al, honest I don’t.’
She grabbed Mott by one arm, twisted it and shoved him at the grave. He tripped over the spade, fell full length into the dug earth. Troy took a step backward and caught him only inches before his face would have crashed headlong into what remained of the corpse’s.
‘Take a good look, you fucking moron,’ Ally yelled. ‘It’s Bernie. It’s Bernie! What have those Irish pricks got over you that you can’t see it?’
Mott recoiled as though he’d been burnt, scrabbling around on the grave until Bonham extended the bear’s paw and yanked him to his feet.
‘It’s Bernie, you stupid little putz. It’s Bernie!’
Before anyone could stop her Ally reached down to the corpse with both hands, tore open the flies to show a blue, purple, black and swollen circumcised penis.
‘Now do you believe me? Or do you think they make a habit of burying kikes in a place like this?’
Mott drank black coffee and smoked his tenth cigarette of the morning. Hacked into his fist for the hundredth time, the sound of sputum stuck in his throat, a redness with the effort that almost brought tears to his eyes.
‘It could be anybody.’
Troy was scarcely listening any more.
‘I mean . . . it could be anybody. Ally always did have a way with words. I mean there’s plenty o’ Jews in London. Why does this dead Jew have to be Bernie? For all we know Bernie’s done a runner with a bit o’ totty. He was always a ladies’ man was Bernie. That’s probably it. He’s holed up in Bournemouth or Eastbourne with some tart. That’d be old Bernie, wouldn’t it, Mr Troy? It could be anybody. I mean anybody. Don’t have to be Bernie. Stands to reason. It don’t have to be. Could be anybody.’
‘Wearing Bernie’s clothes, with Bernie’s cheque book in his pocket? Of course.’
‘Planted, Mr Troy. Planted to make you think it’s Bernie.’
‘Mott, nobody planted anything. They hid him in the last place anyone would look. You’re familiar with the old adage “can’t see the wood for the trees”? That’s what the Ryans did. Hid him where we would not see him for looking. Once we found him, if we found him, what did it matter that it was Bernie? Nobody planted anything. They set him up, they topped him, then they dug a hole and shoved him in it. They could have done it to any one of you. Then they came to you lot, you miserable bunch of yes-men, and told you they were taking over and anyone who didn’t like it would be taking a hike to the bottom of the Thames. And you, Mott, you just rolled over and said, “Walk on me”, didn’t you?’
Mott flicked the ash from his fag on to the knee of his trousers and rubbed it in. The ashtray was only a foot away from his hand and still seemed too far for the effort. ‘Mr Troy, what is it you want me to say?’
Silently Troy weighed up the man who faced him across the table. Kettleman looked even more pathetic than he had yesterday. A scruffy ragbag of clothes posing as a man. A scarecrow made of straw that somehow lived and breathed his foul breath over Troy. A life hardly worth the living. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You can’t say anything because you don’t know anything. You never did.’
‘I spent most o’ last night telling you that.’
‘And I believe you, Mott.’
‘Then I can go now, right?’
‘Right. You can go. I’ll need about five minutes. You finish your cigarette.’
Next door Alice Marx was bashing away at an old Met-issue Smith-Corona and scattering as much fag ash as Mott. Shrimp Robertson sat across from her.
‘He’s supposed to type it for you,’ Troy said.
‘The boy types with two fingers. I’d be here all day if I had to wait for him. I can touch-type. Or did you think I’d never done a day’s work in me life?’
Troy let Robertson go.
Ally stopped typing, tore her statement and its carbon from the roller. ‘I never wanted to do this. I told you that. You’re a bastard. But Bernie’s dead now. No two ways about it. There’s nothing left to lose. I suppose,’ Ally said, ‘that you’re gonna tell me there was no other way to do this?’
‘There wasn’t.’
‘Fine. I won’t break yer bollocks over it. But there’s gotto bea quid pro quo.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Don’t send a squad car roaring round to Millie Champion’s with some tosser of a copper to tell ’er ’er ’usband’s dead.’
‘I wasn’t going to.’
‘Let me do it. I don’t want to do it. But I have to. If you see what I mean.’
Troy did. ‘My driver will take you to Millie’s. When you’re through she’ll take you back to your home. And I’ll put a copper from Hendon on your door until this is over.’
‘And that shitbag, Mott?’
Troy released Mott Kettle, returned to Godbehere’s office and sent for Mazzer. He was witnessing Ally’s statement when Mazzer walked in. The sweeping, overlarge, quasi-Cyrillic sprawl of his own signature. Big enough and long enough for Mazzer to have no doubt about what he’d just done.
‘Mott’s at the desk picking up his possessions. Tail him. If you have to stay up all night, tail him and don’t lose him.’
He put Ally’s statement into a brown folder marked ‘Kettleman’ and dropped it into a desk drawer. Mazzer was still standing there.
‘Yes?’
‘Nothing, sir, nothing.’
‘Keep me posted. I’ll be back at the Yard most of today.’
Onions appeared in his office again. A bad day. A day in uniform. All those oak leaves and silver trim. Troy could see the seething anger at life and fate and nothing in his eyes. Occasionally he wondered how long Stan would stick the job. The bitterness of it was overwhelming. Too late in his career to be effective, too tied up in red tape for a man like him to slice through. The pinnacle of any copper’s career amounting to no more than the biggest frustration of that career. Brock had made the right move. He’d tried in his way to tell Stan as much. Brock might – no, would have been happy on his allotment. But once you’d reached the absurdity of being Sir Stanley Onions how could you ever put on your overalls and your hob-nailed boots and earth up spuds on your allotment again?
Onions lit up a Woodbine, popped the buttons on his tunic and heard Troy out in silence. ‘You’re getting a warrant?’ he said at last.
‘I don’t think I am,’ said Troy.
A deep drag on his cigarette. ‘You’ve enough to pull ’em now.’
‘It’s too soon.’
A splutter of coughing, a fleck of tobacco picked from his tongue. ‘Too soon? Too soon for what? The sooner those buggers are off the street, the sooner the toffs and the wankers are off my back. You may get the press and the back-bench timewasters, but I still have to answer to the Home Secretary and every junior minister who wants to have his two penn’orth. And I still have to read the editorials every day. “A Sea of Crime in the East End”, “Scotland Yard Losing Control”, “The Country Going to Hell in a Handcart”. The toffs want to hang me out to dry, can’t you see that?’
This required tact. If Stan was open to tact he was, and if he wasn’t he wasn’t. ‘Stan, we’ve lost them once. Surely you can see that the next time we pull them it has to stick? There can be no loopholes. We have a reversal of their alibi. That will be meat and drink to their brief. He’ll argue that we coerced Ally Marx into withdrawing one statement and making another. He’ll say it here and he’ll say it in court.’
‘It’s hardly going to wash with a jury, though, is it?’
‘We don’t have the luxury of waiting for a jury. We have to be one hundred per cent certain before we put those two in front of a jury. Alice’s statement does nothing to mitigate the confusion of Jack’s two eyewitnesses and what happened at the line-up. It’s a bit less of a mess but it’s still a mess.’
Just when he thought Onions was about to launch himself into another tirade Troy was saved by the bell. He picked up the phone and Onions silently took his cue and left.
‘I did as you asked,’ Milligan said. ‘Mrs Devanney came clean. Young Niall got his marching orders from his dad. She tried to get between them and the old man thumped both of them for her trouble. She wept buckets this morning. She has a bit of difficulty accepting that her son’s queer, but she’s a realist – she isn’t denying what her senses told her. Accepting that he’s dead . . . that’s another matter. She can’t quite take that in. But – and it’s a huge but – she wants to know for sure. In fact, she wants to see the body.’
‘Oh, God. Did you tell her the state it was in?’
‘I did. And she wept yet more buckets. But she’s a tough old stick. Insists she has to see for herself. I agreed to drive her to the station tomorrow. She should be at Euston around quarter past two. If you don’t mind me suggesting, I think you should have a WPC there with you. I don’t know what her reaction will be when she sees the corpse.’
‘Point taken. If it was a simple matter like a corpse I would still be concerned, but this is like a pack of human joints. I don’t see how her seeing them can do any good.’
‘Ask yourself this, Freddie, would your mum know you from an arm or a buttock? Can a mother somehow see the body she wiped and washed for ten years in the grown man or even the remains of the grown man?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Troy. ‘I honestly don’t know.’